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Lot Essay
‘Art should not be a trompe-l’oeil but a trompe-l’esprit’
(Picasso, quoted in R. Desnos, Écrits sur les peintres, Paris, 1984)
Executed in Saint-Raphaël in the summer of 1919, Pablo Picasso’s Nature morte devant une fenȇtre is one of the first in a series of what have become known as guéridon still-lifes that saw the artist blend Synthetic Cubism with the prevailing aesthetics of the ‘return to order’. As the trauma of the First World War reverberated across France and Europe, artists and writers alike called for a new stability, harmony and collectivism in art. Idiosyncrasy and individualism were shunned, replaced by the desire for unity, reconstruction and perhaps most importantly, a veneration of tradition and the classical. Within this atavistic avant-garde, Picasso was able to effortlessly alternate between Cubism and Classicism, modernity and tradition, executing his Ingres-inspired line drawings and painting statuesque, naturalistically depicted figures, while at the same time, creating fragmented geometric cubist compositions. Nature morte devant une fenȇtre is a work that combines these two seemingly disparate aesthetics, portraying the artist’s indomitable creative power and reflecting his already unsurmountable role as the leader of the post-war avant-garde of Paris.
Picasso had spent much of the spring of 1919 in London, where he was working with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes on the production of Le Tricorne. After several months in the British capital, Picasso returned to Paris eager to immerse himself in avant-garde developments there. In the middle of August he travelled with his new wife, the Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova, to Saint-Raphaël, a small town popular with British holiday makers situated on the French Riviera between Cannes and Saint Tropez. Here the newly married couple stayed in the elegant Hôtel Continental et des Bains. Their room and balcony looked out over the sparkling Mediterranean, and it was this setting that inspired Picasso to begin a series of elegant domestic still-lifes in pencil, gouache and watercolour that featured a table placed in front of the open hotel window.
As with others in the rest of this series, Nature morte devant une fenȇtre features an ornate, biomorphically-shaped guéridon table upon which a collection of quintessentially cubist still-life objects are placed – most legible here a guitar and a bowl of fruit. Behind this, the azure waters of the sea and cloudless powder blue sky stretch into the distance, the ornate wrought iron bars of the balcony balustrade serving as the boundary between the room and the expansive panorama beyond. The hermeticism that defined the dense, often inscrutable compositions of pre-war Cubism has been expunged; quite literally, the window has been thrown open and the outside world let in.
In Nature morte devant une fenȇtre, the table and its contents are rendered with geometric interlocking planes of colour stacked atop each other. Picasso has used the ground of the work itself to create the form of the guitar and the table surface, creating an effect reminiscent of his earlier cubist papier-collés, which integrated found papers into the fragmented still-life compositions. The empathic flatness of this seemingly cubist assemblage is at odds with the pictorial depth that the illusionistic background of the scene implies. In this way, the fractured and distorted style of Cubism is brought next to a representational idiom, creating a strong visual contrast between these two modes of pictorial creation. In combining these disparate artistic languages, Picasso brings modernity and tradition side by side; combining these aesthetics together to create this image. A playful visual embodiment of the opposing facets of the post-war avant-garde, this painting shows Picasso’s protean ability to create and to invent. It has also been suggested that these guéridon still-lifes serve as a wry take on this divided avant-garde; as Kenneth E. Silver has written, ‘Surely there is a bit of irony here, in the amusing juxtaposition of modernist still-life with the super-realism of the setting’ (K.E. Silver, Esprit des Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, London, 1989, p. 352).
Nature morte devant une fenȇtre was previously owned by the French aristocrat and patron of modern art and music, Count Étienne de Beaumont. A leading figure of les années folles in Paris, he was notorious for the extravagant parties and masked balls that he threw, as well as for his patronage of modern artists, dancers and musicians alike. Picasso was introduced to Beaumont by Jean Cocteau, at one of his famed parties, and he remained close to the artist and his wife until the Second World War.
(Picasso, quoted in R. Desnos, Écrits sur les peintres, Paris, 1984)
Executed in Saint-Raphaël in the summer of 1919, Pablo Picasso’s Nature morte devant une fenȇtre is one of the first in a series of what have become known as guéridon still-lifes that saw the artist blend Synthetic Cubism with the prevailing aesthetics of the ‘return to order’. As the trauma of the First World War reverberated across France and Europe, artists and writers alike called for a new stability, harmony and collectivism in art. Idiosyncrasy and individualism were shunned, replaced by the desire for unity, reconstruction and perhaps most importantly, a veneration of tradition and the classical. Within this atavistic avant-garde, Picasso was able to effortlessly alternate between Cubism and Classicism, modernity and tradition, executing his Ingres-inspired line drawings and painting statuesque, naturalistically depicted figures, while at the same time, creating fragmented geometric cubist compositions. Nature morte devant une fenȇtre is a work that combines these two seemingly disparate aesthetics, portraying the artist’s indomitable creative power and reflecting his already unsurmountable role as the leader of the post-war avant-garde of Paris.
Picasso had spent much of the spring of 1919 in London, where he was working with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes on the production of Le Tricorne. After several months in the British capital, Picasso returned to Paris eager to immerse himself in avant-garde developments there. In the middle of August he travelled with his new wife, the Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova, to Saint-Raphaël, a small town popular with British holiday makers situated on the French Riviera between Cannes and Saint Tropez. Here the newly married couple stayed in the elegant Hôtel Continental et des Bains. Their room and balcony looked out over the sparkling Mediterranean, and it was this setting that inspired Picasso to begin a series of elegant domestic still-lifes in pencil, gouache and watercolour that featured a table placed in front of the open hotel window.
As with others in the rest of this series, Nature morte devant une fenȇtre features an ornate, biomorphically-shaped guéridon table upon which a collection of quintessentially cubist still-life objects are placed – most legible here a guitar and a bowl of fruit. Behind this, the azure waters of the sea and cloudless powder blue sky stretch into the distance, the ornate wrought iron bars of the balcony balustrade serving as the boundary between the room and the expansive panorama beyond. The hermeticism that defined the dense, often inscrutable compositions of pre-war Cubism has been expunged; quite literally, the window has been thrown open and the outside world let in.
In Nature morte devant une fenȇtre, the table and its contents are rendered with geometric interlocking planes of colour stacked atop each other. Picasso has used the ground of the work itself to create the form of the guitar and the table surface, creating an effect reminiscent of his earlier cubist papier-collés, which integrated found papers into the fragmented still-life compositions. The empathic flatness of this seemingly cubist assemblage is at odds with the pictorial depth that the illusionistic background of the scene implies. In this way, the fractured and distorted style of Cubism is brought next to a representational idiom, creating a strong visual contrast between these two modes of pictorial creation. In combining these disparate artistic languages, Picasso brings modernity and tradition side by side; combining these aesthetics together to create this image. A playful visual embodiment of the opposing facets of the post-war avant-garde, this painting shows Picasso’s protean ability to create and to invent. It has also been suggested that these guéridon still-lifes serve as a wry take on this divided avant-garde; as Kenneth E. Silver has written, ‘Surely there is a bit of irony here, in the amusing juxtaposition of modernist still-life with the super-realism of the setting’ (K.E. Silver, Esprit des Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, London, 1989, p. 352).
Nature morte devant une fenȇtre was previously owned by the French aristocrat and patron of modern art and music, Count Étienne de Beaumont. A leading figure of les années folles in Paris, he was notorious for the extravagant parties and masked balls that he threw, as well as for his patronage of modern artists, dancers and musicians alike. Picasso was introduced to Beaumont by Jean Cocteau, at one of his famed parties, and he remained close to the artist and his wife until the Second World War.