Pablo Picasso

Gordon Onslow-Ford, San Francisco (acquired by 1950)
Gardner Dailey, San Francisco
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (a gift from the above in January 1951; sale: Christie's, New York, 7th November 2007, lot 419)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, Selected European Masters, 1950

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals a cluster of tiny pin-sized spots of retouching to the lower right quadrant and possibly some very old retouching to the lower parts of the left and right edges. This work is in very good condition.
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Nature morte is one of a number of still-lifes that Picasso painted in the early 1920s, at a time when the artist was revising his pre-war Cubist experiments. With the sobriety of the war years behind him, Picasso began to combine pure colour with powerful linear black shading to express volume and space. In 1938 Gertrude Stein wrote: ‘During this period... the cubic forms were continually being replaced by surfaces and lines, the lines were more important than anything else, they lived by and in themselves, he painted his pictures not by means of his objects, but by the lines’ (Gertrude Stein, Picasso, London, 1938, pp. 27-8).

In the present work, Picasso combines both natural and Cubist elements, abandoning the decorative approach for a bold linearity and angularity of forms.  Discussing this phase of Picasso's Cubism, John Richardson notes that these still-lifes ‘are astonishingly varied in their dazzling colours, elaborate patterning, rich textures and complex compositions. No longer did Picasso feel obliged to investigate the intricate formal and spatial problems that had preoccupied him ten years before. Instead he felt free to relax and exploit his cubist discoveries in a decorative manner that delights the eye’ (John Richardson, Picasso, An American Tribute (exhibition catalogue), Knoedler Galleries, New York, 1962).

Although he rarely spoke about his paintings, Picasso commented on the liberties he took with his still-lifes: It is a misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me... How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth!  I put all the things I like into my pictures. Things, so much the worse for them; they just have to put up with it’ (quoted in Christian Zervos, "Conversations avec Picasso," Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1935, pp. 173-74).  As the present work attests and John Richardson has observed, still-life was the genre which Picasso would eventually explore more exhaustively and develop more imaginatively than any other artist in history’ (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. ll, New York, 1991, p. 441).