Pablo Picasso

Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris (sold: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 7-8, 1923, lot 349)

Galerie Simon, Paris

Paul Eluard, Paris

James Johnson Sweeney, New York (before 1936)

Acquired by 1959

(possibly) New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936

Los Angeles, Art Galleries of the University of California, Ruth McClymonds Maitland Collection, 1959

Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Teaching Exhibition on Cubism, 1973

Providence, Museum of Art,  Rhode Island School of Design, 1980-89 (long term loan)

Providence, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1900 until Now: Modern Art from Rhode Island Collections, 1988

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, oeuvres de 1912 à 1917, vol. 2**, no. 433, Paris, 1961, illustrated pl. 202

Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso, The Cubist Years, 1910-1916, London, 1979, no. 568, illustrated p. 297

Josep Palau I Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907-1917), New York, 1990, no. 876, illustrated p. 308

Of all the manifestations of Picasso’s art throughout his long career, his Cubist compositions are among his most inventive and aesthetically original.  Picasso, along with Georges Braque, pioneered this artistic movement and introduced the avant-garde to new levels of pictorial abstraction. Still-lifes were usually the favored subjects of these depictions, and never before had this age-old theme been interpreted with such a radical approach.   Picasso experimented with the deconstruction and reconstruction of form and the manipulation of space in these compositions, manipulating the physical properties of the objects he was depicting.  Bouteille et verre, executed in early 1913 while Picasso was living in Paris, is a wonderful rendition of this theme. 

Over the course of the 1910s, Picasso’s Cubism developed from fractured, highly abstract “analytical” depictions of form to more legible “synthetic” compositions that incorporated elements of collage.  Bouteille et verre exemplifies the tenets of this later phase of Cubism. As Christopher Green has written, "In general terms, then, throughout the war period Picasso built up his Cubist images, not, it seems, by stylizing from the seen or remembered, but rather in what has been called the 'synthetic' way, by working directly with simple combinations of shapes which could act as signs for figures and objects. As a Cubist, he did not 'analyse' things on the basis of observation arriving at a representation by breaking them down part by part, he built up his images synthetically: he invented  his figures or objects without the immediate stimulus of models or motifs. His decision once again to become the painter of representational pictures suggestive of tradition had no effect on the way he continued to work as a 'synthetic Cubist' " (Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 15-16).

In this picture, Picasso presents a bottle, its shape constructed using a piece of newspaper, and a wineglass, painted against a rectangular background that resembles a striated black marble table top.    In his catalogue raisonné on the artist’s work from this period, Pierre Daix explained the process that Picasso employed to create this collage: “The relief has been produced by the addition of sand, or possibly ashes.  The shape at the top (a second glass?) has been stenciled in with white lead, using a cardboard plate, so creating a relief with clear-cut edges.  The wineglass on the rectangle of imitation marble, bottom right, has been painted with a palette knife” (Daix, op. cit, p. 297).

The use of newspaper clippings is the hallmark of the collages that Picasso completed between 1912 and 1914.  Whether cut, shaped and pasted into a more graphic composition (see figs. 1 and 2) or employed as the ground for an overlaying composition (see fig. 3), the newspapers and their text invested each work with particular meaning.  In the case of the present work,  “triple sec guillot” literally defines the bottle which Picasso attempts to replicate by cutting the newspaper into a cylindrical shape.  The newspaper, therefore, plays a dual role in clarifying the form, both textually and formally.  The interplay of word and image has a long and rich tradition in the history of paintings, dating back to the inscriptions in Renaissance frescos and, more recently, the Tahitian canvases of Gauguin.  But Picasso’s use of newspaper text is a wholly new development in pictorial representation.  In these collages, he manipulates the original context of the words by imbedding them within his own image, redefining the significance of the journalistic text.  Picasso’s truly imaginative word-image decontextualization would inspire numerous artistic and socio-political movements of the 20^th century, from Dadaism in the 1920s to Post-Modernism in the 1980s.  Bouteille et verre heralds this revolution in visual expression.

Fig. 1, Photograph of Picasso’s studio on the Boulevard Raspail, Paris, late 1912

Fig. 2, Pablo Picasso, Table avec bouteille et verre, Paris, 1912, collage, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Fig. 3, Pablo Picasso, Bouteille sur la table, Paris, late 1912, collage, Musée Picasso, Paris