Nature morte au compotier

Pablo Picasso painted Nature morte au compotier in 1919-20, during a period when his art had taken several diverse paths. While the Neo-Classicism associated with his portraits of his ballerina wife Olga Khokhlova and with his silhouette-like drawings were highly figurative, Picasso continued to explore, adapt and develop the Cubist idiom that he had pioneered at the turn of the 1910s. In Nature morte au compotier, this is evident in the lyrical clarity with which he has rendered the scene. There is no clutter: instead, an arrangement of mainly geometrical forms cohere in order to give the impression of the bowl and table, his exclusive subject. Unlike the Purism that would later come to define the works of several Paris-based artists during the 1920s, which was likewise rooted in the realm of geometry, Picasso has introduced a playfulness into Nature morte au compotier in part through the fictive patterning in the background, evoked through lyrical arrow-like flicks of paint, and by the mock wood staining of the table itself. Likewise, he has used the entire border, a false frame device similar to that which he and Georges Braque had begun to employ in their still life compositions of 1914, to heighten that sense of geometry, yet in a humorous manner.

Nature morte au compotier is a Cubistic still life that extends the legacy of the guéridon pictures he had been painting during 1919, especially during his time in Saint-Raphaël during that year's Summer, yet here we are shown a close-up of the surface of the table, rather than the window-side views that he created during that time. In this way, Picasso has created a more intimate still life composition in Nature morte au compotier that taps into the so-called Rappel à l'ordre that was to come to characterise the artistic idioms of so many of his contemporaries during the following years, as they sought to introduce harmony and logic into their work, shunning the chaos of the First World War and attempting to light beacons of cultural hope. Nonetheless, the shapes of the forms in Nature morte au compotier also recall, with a contrariness wholly suited to Picasso, the collages that had been created by artists associated with the Dada movement, so many of whom would come to be his friends especially during his involvement with Surrealism. These shapes appear cut and folded, jostling energetically against each other, eking out their contrasts.