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Lot Essay
“When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for.”
Pablo Picasso
Executed in 1923, Pablo Picasso’s Trois pommes et verre is a sumptuous ode to summer’s pleasures. Three yellow-green apples cast dark shadows across a sandy ground. Nearby, a single goblet reflects the soft blues of a placid sea. The painting’s colors are warm and balmy, conjuring images of a languid seaside picnic held, perhaps, along the pristine beaches of Cap d'Antibes, where Picasso and his wife Olga vacationed that year.
Picasso created Trois pommes et verre using both oil paint and sand, the latter employed during this period to introduce texture to the picture plane and to explore the range of effects achievable through its use. By incorporating sand to enhance the composition’s dimensionality, Picasso also reinforces the connection between the work’s flattened, fragmented forms and his earlier Cubist investigations, in which he sought to capture multiple perspectives within a single image.
As art historian Elizabeth Cowling observed, Picasso, “identified Cubism with still life, and still life with Cubism, in the early 1920s” (Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 377). The genre continued to encourage Picasso’s stylistic innovation, and his motif, at times, was secondary to such visual experiments. In paintings like Trois pommes et verre, Picasso explores ideas of structure, decoration, and rhythm, yet despite their formal inventiveness, he did not pursue pictorial evolution in a dogmatic manner. Rather, his art was always “made for the present with the hope that it will always remain in the present”: as he reflected, “I have never made trials or experiments. Whenever I had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I felt it ought to be said” (“Statement by Picasso: 1923,” reprinted in A.H. Barr Jr., ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939, p. 11). Trois pommes et verre feels wholly of the present, as if Picasso took up his paints and brushes desperate to remember an afternoon spent sunbathing next to Olga in the South of France.
Picasso’s Trois pommes et verre was previously in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, a gift from the celebrated dealer and collector, Justin K. Thannhauser. After fleeing Germany in 1937, Thannhauser moved first to Paris and then to New York following the German Occupation of France in 1940. While working as a dealer in New York, Thannhauser also built his personal collection, and in 1963, announced that he would donate seventy-five works to The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a gift which included paintings by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet.
Pablo Picasso
Executed in 1923, Pablo Picasso’s Trois pommes et verre is a sumptuous ode to summer’s pleasures. Three yellow-green apples cast dark shadows across a sandy ground. Nearby, a single goblet reflects the soft blues of a placid sea. The painting’s colors are warm and balmy, conjuring images of a languid seaside picnic held, perhaps, along the pristine beaches of Cap d'Antibes, where Picasso and his wife Olga vacationed that year.
Picasso created Trois pommes et verre using both oil paint and sand, the latter employed during this period to introduce texture to the picture plane and to explore the range of effects achievable through its use. By incorporating sand to enhance the composition’s dimensionality, Picasso also reinforces the connection between the work’s flattened, fragmented forms and his earlier Cubist investigations, in which he sought to capture multiple perspectives within a single image.
As art historian Elizabeth Cowling observed, Picasso, “identified Cubism with still life, and still life with Cubism, in the early 1920s” (Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 377). The genre continued to encourage Picasso’s stylistic innovation, and his motif, at times, was secondary to such visual experiments. In paintings like Trois pommes et verre, Picasso explores ideas of structure, decoration, and rhythm, yet despite their formal inventiveness, he did not pursue pictorial evolution in a dogmatic manner. Rather, his art was always “made for the present with the hope that it will always remain in the present”: as he reflected, “I have never made trials or experiments. Whenever I had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I felt it ought to be said” (“Statement by Picasso: 1923,” reprinted in A.H. Barr Jr., ed., Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939, p. 11). Trois pommes et verre feels wholly of the present, as if Picasso took up his paints and brushes desperate to remember an afternoon spent sunbathing next to Olga in the South of France.
Picasso’s Trois pommes et verre was previously in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, a gift from the celebrated dealer and collector, Justin K. Thannhauser. After fleeing Germany in 1937, Thannhauser moved first to Paris and then to New York following the German Occupation of France in 1940. While working as a dealer in New York, Thannhauser also built his personal collection, and in 1963, announced that he would donate seventy-five works to The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a gift which included paintings by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet.