Jean Pougny, 1894-1956

Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Jean Pougny, 12th May - 22nd August 1993, no.61
Iwan Puni, Berlinische Galerie Museum für Moderne Kunst, Photografie und Architektur

Jean Pougny Exhibition Catalogue, Editions Paris-Musées, 1993

Jean Pougny’s entire oeuvre reflects an incessant creative search, touching practically all major art movements and schools that emerged in the first quarter of 20^th century. Early in his artistic career, during the tumultuous years 1912-1916 just before the revolution, Pougny, together with Malevich, Tatlin and Larionov, was at the helm of the Russian Futurist movement. After attempting to work under the Soviet regime; he excaped into Germany. Living in Berlin in the early 1920s Pougny’s works attained an emphasis on mathematical order, purity and logic so favourable among Purists, who, lead by Amédée Ozenfant, welcomed the artist’s move to Paris in 1924. In the same year Ozenfant published an article on Pougny’s works in his magazine L’Esprit Nouveau, dedicated to the theories of Purism, but by that time the artist had once again moved on.

Still life with Pitcher and Chessboard completed in Paris in 1924-1925 embraces the experience and achievements of the artist’s creative searches to date, while at the same time opening a completely new series of still lifes of 1924-1928. These pieces are characterised by a return to the realism of Pougny’s earlier years, but depict objects with a newly developed sense of plasticity and have a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere.

The composition Still life with Pitcher and Chessboard is reminiscent of an earlier work from the artist’s more Realist period, Still life with Pink Vase and Billiard Triangle, 1917. Indeed, both paintings are constructed along the same lines: a large white vessel stands at the centre of a round table, while the tilting chessboard makes up a triangle together with a billiard rack in the earlier work and wooden plank. The saucer in Still life with Pitcher and Chessboard plays the role of the white billiard ball from the preceding work.

While the 1917 still life is an early study of the correlations of objects in space with the respect to their individual and mutual meanings, Still life with Pitcher and Chessboard gives this theme a new and unusual twist. The entire composition is placed farther away from the viewer and is set against a seemingly neutral background. All secondary elements from the comparatively detailed earlier work are eliminated; the objects’ shapes are almost reduced to symbols. This still life possesses a strange surreal quality: the pitcher and the chessboard seem to float in the air, while the shadows cast by the table and the wooden plank defy physical possibility.