Lot Essay
On 27 July 1944, Picasso began to paint a series of still lives depicting tomato plants. Consisting of four preparatory drawings, five unfinished oil sketches and four completed oil paintings, the series was completed on 12 August, just two weeks before the liberation of Paris.
Street fighting between the Resistance, Vichy and German forces had increased, making it difficult for Picasso to move between his rue la Botie apartment and rue des Grands Augustins studio. This induced him to shut up his apartment and settle into the studio and its adjoining rooms for the remainder of the Occupation. As he did throughout the wartime years, Picasso again turned to subject-matter close at hand: the still-life. Picasso presumably had tomato plants growing on the balcony, and many of the works from this series incorporate the window panes of the balcony or cloud formations, as seen in the present work. As Roland Penrose has stated, "These familiar scenes were painted with sober feeling for the grey stones and angular patterns of walls and roofs which in his hands gave to the city the facets of a diamond" (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 348).
Picasso was recording this consequence of war, not as a deprivation, but as a source of admiration. His tomatoes are heavy and full, most of them a handsome green promising the blush of [ink, and then the brilliant vermillion of the ripe fruit. Picasso could not have helped admiring their readiness to grow toward the freely painted sunlight and sky, which he expressed in the movement of the vines and the shape of the leaves as well as in the fruits themselves. The tomato plants are an earthly metaphor for the human need to survive and flourish even within the constraints of war (Picasso and Things, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992, p. 286).
Street fighting between the Resistance, Vichy and German forces had increased, making it difficult for Picasso to move between his rue la Botie apartment and rue des Grands Augustins studio. This induced him to shut up his apartment and settle into the studio and its adjoining rooms for the remainder of the Occupation. As he did throughout the wartime years, Picasso again turned to subject-matter close at hand: the still-life. Picasso presumably had tomato plants growing on the balcony, and many of the works from this series incorporate the window panes of the balcony or cloud formations, as seen in the present work. As Roland Penrose has stated, "These familiar scenes were painted with sober feeling for the grey stones and angular patterns of walls and roofs which in his hands gave to the city the facets of a diamond" (R. Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981, p. 348).
Picasso was recording this consequence of war, not as a deprivation, but as a source of admiration. His tomatoes are heavy and full, most of them a handsome green promising the blush of [ink, and then the brilliant vermillion of the ripe fruit. Picasso could not have helped admiring their readiness to grow toward the freely painted sunlight and sky, which he expressed in the movement of the vines and the shape of the leaves as well as in the fruits themselves. The tomato plants are an earthly metaphor for the human need to survive and flourish even within the constraints of war (Picasso and Things, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992, p. 286).