Pablo Picasso

Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris
Galerie Alex Vömel, Dusseldorf (acquired by 1942; until at least 1956)
Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva (1987-89)
Private Collection, Europe

Bremen, Kunsthalle, Internationale Ausstellung, 1914, no. 269
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Vier Euwen Stilleven in Frankrijk, 1954, no. 142
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Rheinisches Museum Köln-Deutz & Hamburg, Kunsthalle-Altbau, Picasso: 1900-1955, 1955-56, no. 27, illustrated in the catalogue
Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Europäische Kunst 1912, 1962, no. 24
New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, Picasso: Cubist Works from the Marina Picasso Collection, 1987, no. 3, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Oeuvres de 1906 à 1912, Paris, 1942, vol. 2*, no. 232, illustrated pl. 115
Franco Russoli & Fiorella Minervino, L'Opera completa di Picasso cubista, Milan, 1972, no. 367, illustrated p. 105
Pierre Daix & Jean Rosselet, Le Cubisme de Picasso. Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint 1907-1916, Neuchâtel, 1979, no. 373, illustrated p. 260 (as dating from winter 1910-11)
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubisme: 1907-1917, Paris, 1990, no. 560, illustrated in colour p. 202 (titled Le Secrétaire and as dating from winter 1910-11)

Executed in the winter of 1910, L'Ecritoire belongs to one of the most important periods of Picasso’s oeuvre, Analytical Cubism, a turning point not only in his own painting, but also a pivotal moment in the development of modern art. During the summer of that year, spent at Cadaquès, Picasso's paintings reached a higher level of abstraction than his early Cubist works, and on his return to Paris he continued to develop this highly geometric and linear style. It was at this time that Picasso began to introduce what John Golding has referred to as 'visual clues, small fragments of legibility, into his work to render it more accessible to the spectator' (J. Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis 1907-1914, New York, 1959). The months that followed, until the spring of 1911, were among the most solitary in Picasso's career, a period that was marked by an intense search for new pictorial solutions resulting in some of his most ground-breaking works.

 

In the spring of 1910, Picasso largely gave up the diagonal lines that characterised his works of 1908-09, and embraced the horizontal and vertical lines of the so-called 'Cubist grid'. For several months, however, he combined both of these technical devices, as visible in the present work. The invention of this linear grid in the summer 1910  was a basis for Picasso’s works executed during the months that followed. He abandoned the more naturalistic forms of his earlier Cubist paintings for a more abstract style. The subject of L'Ecritoire is divided into modules defined by intersecting horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. The objects on a writing desk are highly abstracted, subjugated to the overall structure of the composition. The grisaille palette, which became characteristic of Picasso's early Cubist works, allowed the artist to concentrate on the structure of the composition. The surface of the canvas appears fragmented, and the depicted shapes and objects, mostly concentrated in the lower half of the composition, form a pyramid-like structure.

 

Of all the numerous styles within Picasso's art, Analytical Cubism was by far the most intellectually rigorous. In the process of expanding and refining the vocabulary of Cubism, Picasso was continuously stimulated by his artistic dialogue with Georges Braque. By abandoning bright colours and spontaneous brushwork, both artists moved away from any emotionally expressive references within their canvases, and instead turned to the intellectual exercise of breaking down form and representing three-dimensional figures and objects on a flat picture plane. During this period, Picasso did not need to move from his studio to find a source of inspiration or themes for his painting. The studio itself, with its controlled environment and a select repertoire of images, offered an ideal environment for his artistic experiments and an infinite source of subject matter.

 

In his analysis of the important new developments in Picasso's work that took place at the time the present work was executed, Pepe Carmel wrote: 'The restructuring of Cubist space, in 1910-12, had dramatic results for the bodies and objects in Picasso's and Braque's pictures. Fitting a sold object in to the planes or bands of the grid meant breaking it into series of flat, rectilinear shapes. As Picasso told Kahnweiler, ''Of course, when I want to make a cup, I'll show you that it is round, but the over-all rhythm of the picture, the structure, may force me to show this roundness as a square.'' Already in 1908-09 the imposition of the diagonal lattice had encouraged Picasso and Braque to divide their motifs into triangular or diamond-shaped facets. But the rectilinear grid seemed to require a greater degree of distortion: the artists had literally to square the circle' (P. Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, New Haven & London, 2003, pp. 46-47). It was this increasingly geometric and linear approach explored in works such as L'Ecritoire that led to masterpieces such as Femme à la guitare ('Ma Jolie') (fig. 3), in which Picasso's High Analytical Cubism reached its culmination.