Pablo Picasso

Le Pot de fleurs sur fond noir was painted in July 1932 at Boisgeloup, located in the region of Eure, some fifty miles northwest of Paris. In June 1930 Picasso had bought the 17^th century Château de Boisgeloup, in which he set up a studio, and which provided a summer retreat for many years. Unique in composition, the present work exhibits Picasso’s mastery of simplicity of form and content. During this period, the artist executed several still-life oils and drawings, often combining the image of a vase of flowers with one of the sculptures in his studio. By setting the flowers against a dark background, in the present work Picasso evokes a series of works by Henri Matisse, depicting both figures and still-lifes against black backgrounds.

Jean Sutherland Boggs has compared Picasso’s images of flower bouquets and still lives from this period with the paintings of Henri Rousseau: ‘[Picasso] was capable of being delighted by the freshness of the naïveté of Rousseau’s vision, its ruthless precision and completeness, as well as by the assumption that all petals grow toward the heart of the flower, all leaves toward the branch, and all bouquets are tidily and symmetrically arranged within a vase as if there is some supreme order that makes the world an illogically coherent place. Picasso who had shown how irrational he knew the world to be through his masterpiece […] Demoiselles d’Avignon, could turn to Rousseau’s example when he sought serenity’ (J. S. Boggs, Picasso and Things (exhibition catalogue), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia & Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1992, p. 16).