Pablo Picasso

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Sale: Christie's, London, 27th November 1989, lot 58
Acquired by the present owner in 2005

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1943 et 1944, Paris, 1962, vol. 13, no. 51, illustrated pl. 26
The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Nazi Occupation, 1940-1944, San Francisco, 1999, no. 43-168, illustrated p. 238

The canvas is unlined. There are two very small spots of retouching in the lower right quadrant, visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from a very faint vertical stretcher mark in the centre, this work is in very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although the red and ochre tones are brighter and the greys are more neutral in the original.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Nature morte au compotier belongs to a series of still-life paintings Picasso executed in June 1943, featuring a bowl of cherries and glasses arranged on a tabletop. Painted in occupied Paris, during the time when Picasso was not permitted to exhibit his work publicly, these still-lifes show an austerity in composition and colouration that characterised many of the artist's war-time works. The otherwise near-monochrome surface of the present work is dominated by the bright red cherries in the fruit bowl. Cherries frequently appeared in Picasso's still-lifes over the course of the following decade, and this work is one of his first depictions of this subject. In fact, it was around this time that Picasso began his relationship with the young Françoise Gilot, who later recalled that the artist offered her a bowl of cherries upon first meeting her at a café in 1943.


In the years following the war, Picasso was criticised by some of his contemporaries for the lack of open political engagement in his art. Rather than a vehicle for documenting the destructive reality that surrounded him, painting was for him a world of creativity into which he could escape, and his works of this period certainly express Picasso's state of mind in his own artistic language. Frances Morris wrote about the symbolism of Picasso's still-lifes of the early 1940s: 'above all it was the still-life genre that Picasso developed into a tool capable of evoking the most complex blend of pathos and defiance, of despair to hope, balancing personal and universal experience in an expression of extraordinary emotional power. The hardship of daily life, the fragility of human existence and the threat of death are themes that haunt Picasso's still-life paintings of the war and Liberation periods' (F. Morris, Paris Post War, Art and Existentialism 1945-1955 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 155).