Lot Essay
This painting is sold with a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by Dr. Ramon Favela and dated Sept. 15, 1994.
Still Life with Flowers (1918) was unknown and unpublished until it was auctioned in Paris at the April 17, 1991 sale of "Important Tableaux Modernes" held at the Drouot-Montaigne (Salle Bourdelle) by the Commissaires-Priseurs Associés, Maîtres Laurin, Guilloux, Buffetaud, and Tailleur. It was listed and illustrated as Lot 85, "Diego Rivera, Nature Morte, 1918, huile sur toile, signée et datée en bas vers la droite, 73cm x 92cm.". The buyer of the painting was informed that "it had been acquired directly from the artist in Paris, by Baron Selucier". It has apparently been in Paris since it was painted in 1918. I had no record or knowledge of the painting prior to its appearance on the market in April 1991, but this is not unusual. Many of Rivera's early Parisian works have been appearing periodically on the international market over the past two decades.
This still life painting is a transitional and experimental post-Cubist work executed by Rivera in his Paris studio in February 1918. The Mexican master had been living and working in Paris since his more-or-less permanent move there from his native Mexico in 1911. During the First World War, he was a leading member of the Cubist circle of Picasso, Gris, Lipchitz, Gleizes, Metzinger, and other French and emigré artists discussed in my study of this period, Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years (Diego Rivera: Los Años Cubistas), published by the Phoenix Art Museum and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, in 1984-85. At the end of 1917, Rivera abruptly left his Classical Cubist style and began an intensive period of research and assimilation of the late style and palette of Paul Cézanne. This particular painting from February 1918, unusually large for this period, is one of Rivera's most emphatically Cézannian works, to the point that it can be considered an obvious hommage to Cézanne. It is clearly imitative of Cézanne's late, so-called Grandes Nature Mortes, especially in its color scheme of rich browns, ochres, reds, greens, and violets, and its self-conscious, deliberately arranged compostion (particularly in the broad pyramidal form made by the draped and cascading flowered textile - very similar to the favorite rust-brown, red and green carpet used frequently by Cézanne as a backdrop), all rendered in the calculatedly loose painterly facture of the Master from Aix-en-Provence. Rivera goes so far as to even reproduce elements of the same flowered and lonzenge-patterned wall paper that Cézanne used in several of his Nature mortes avec vase paillé et fruits sur une table, between 1895-1900. These still lifes are illustrated in the Catalogue raisonné of Cézanne's work by Lionello Venturi, Cézanne: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1936), especially Venturi's numbers 733, 737, 738, and 1134.
To my knowledge, this is the only known still life by Rivera to include the straw-bound ginger jar, or vase paillé, so characteristic of Cézanne's distinctively rural French still life motifs. But the small white and gray ceramic creamer (pot à crème) was utilized by Rivera in several of his Cubist still lifes from 1916. In particular, the ceramic creamer is identical to the one drawn in graphite pencil by Rivera in his Naturaleza Muerta con Cigarrillos of 1917, which is today in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum (illustrated in Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years, cat. no. 70, p. 142). There is another Naturaleza Muerta by Rivera from late 1917-early 1918 (today in a private collection), which includes a similar bowl of fruit rendered in an elevated Cézannian perspective combined with curvilinear perspective experiments and tonal progressions of color that are carefully delineated in the forms. This 1918 still life is illustrated in Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years catalogue as figure no. 18, on page 50.
This present still life appears somewhat unusual within the development of Rivera's post-Cubist 1918-19 oeuvre, primarily because of its size. It is most probably a unique experimental work, where Rivera tentatively returns to semi-naturalistic forms evoking and treating several well-known Cézannian clichés, such as the deliberately arranged still life setting, the distinctively "French" motifs (pot à crème, floral patterned wall-paper, ginger jar, book, fruit bowl, and patterned ceramic flower vase). What makes the work so particularly and overtly Cézannian, and in that sense unique for Rivera's still lifes from this period, is the disposition of the broadly unfolding and heavily patterned textile cloth, bulky in its weight, which cascades in voluminous folds over the carefully wrought (in paint) wooden table-top. The characteristically parallel brushwork, which is comprised of self-consciously hatched, agitated and abrupt flat marks clearly evokes Cézanne's late brush strokes or taches, which were so important in building up forms in terms of discrete patches of color. Even the broad planes of both background walls, especially the left wall, are composed of colors heavily modulated to reproduce this Cézannian painterly effect. The usually high angle of the view also harks back to Rivera's sustained study of Cézanne's pictorial ideas as does the overall, self-consciously schematic quality of the composition.
With what is now known about Rivera's early career, it can readily be seen just how brightly Cézanne's guiding star shines over this most "baroque" of Rivera's post-Cubist, and geometrically-based, experimental works.
Dr. Ramón Favela
March 16, 1995
Santa Barbara, California
Still Life with Flowers (1918) was unknown and unpublished until it was auctioned in Paris at the April 17, 1991 sale of "Important Tableaux Modernes" held at the Drouot-Montaigne (Salle Bourdelle) by the Commissaires-Priseurs Associés, Maîtres Laurin, Guilloux, Buffetaud, and Tailleur. It was listed and illustrated as Lot 85, "Diego Rivera, Nature Morte, 1918, huile sur toile, signée et datée en bas vers la droite, 73cm x 92cm.". The buyer of the painting was informed that "it had been acquired directly from the artist in Paris, by Baron Selucier". It has apparently been in Paris since it was painted in 1918. I had no record or knowledge of the painting prior to its appearance on the market in April 1991, but this is not unusual. Many of Rivera's early Parisian works have been appearing periodically on the international market over the past two decades.
This still life painting is a transitional and experimental post-Cubist work executed by Rivera in his Paris studio in February 1918. The Mexican master had been living and working in Paris since his more-or-less permanent move there from his native Mexico in 1911. During the First World War, he was a leading member of the Cubist circle of Picasso, Gris, Lipchitz, Gleizes, Metzinger, and other French and emigré artists discussed in my study of this period, Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years (Diego Rivera: Los Años Cubistas), published by the Phoenix Art Museum and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, in 1984-85. At the end of 1917, Rivera abruptly left his Classical Cubist style and began an intensive period of research and assimilation of the late style and palette of Paul Cézanne. This particular painting from February 1918, unusually large for this period, is one of Rivera's most emphatically Cézannian works, to the point that it can be considered an obvious hommage to Cézanne. It is clearly imitative of Cézanne's late, so-called Grandes Nature Mortes, especially in its color scheme of rich browns, ochres, reds, greens, and violets, and its self-conscious, deliberately arranged compostion (particularly in the broad pyramidal form made by the draped and cascading flowered textile - very similar to the favorite rust-brown, red and green carpet used frequently by Cézanne as a backdrop), all rendered in the calculatedly loose painterly facture of the Master from Aix-en-Provence. Rivera goes so far as to even reproduce elements of the same flowered and lonzenge-patterned wall paper that Cézanne used in several of his Nature mortes avec vase paillé et fruits sur une table, between 1895-1900. These still lifes are illustrated in the Catalogue raisonné of Cézanne's work by Lionello Venturi, Cézanne: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Paul Rosenberg, 1936), especially Venturi's numbers 733, 737, 738, and 1134.
To my knowledge, this is the only known still life by Rivera to include the straw-bound ginger jar, or vase paillé, so characteristic of Cézanne's distinctively rural French still life motifs. But the small white and gray ceramic creamer (pot à crème) was utilized by Rivera in several of his Cubist still lifes from 1916. In particular, the ceramic creamer is identical to the one drawn in graphite pencil by Rivera in his Naturaleza Muerta con Cigarrillos of 1917, which is today in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum (illustrated in Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years, cat. no. 70, p. 142). There is another Naturaleza Muerta by Rivera from late 1917-early 1918 (today in a private collection), which includes a similar bowl of fruit rendered in an elevated Cézannian perspective combined with curvilinear perspective experiments and tonal progressions of color that are carefully delineated in the forms. This 1918 still life is illustrated in Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years catalogue as figure no. 18, on page 50.
This present still life appears somewhat unusual within the development of Rivera's post-Cubist 1918-19 oeuvre, primarily because of its size. It is most probably a unique experimental work, where Rivera tentatively returns to semi-naturalistic forms evoking and treating several well-known Cézannian clichés, such as the deliberately arranged still life setting, the distinctively "French" motifs (pot à crème, floral patterned wall-paper, ginger jar, book, fruit bowl, and patterned ceramic flower vase). What makes the work so particularly and overtly Cézannian, and in that sense unique for Rivera's still lifes from this period, is the disposition of the broadly unfolding and heavily patterned textile cloth, bulky in its weight, which cascades in voluminous folds over the carefully wrought (in paint) wooden table-top. The characteristically parallel brushwork, which is comprised of self-consciously hatched, agitated and abrupt flat marks clearly evokes Cézanne's late brush strokes or taches, which were so important in building up forms in terms of discrete patches of color. Even the broad planes of both background walls, especially the left wall, are composed of colors heavily modulated to reproduce this Cézannian painterly effect. The usually high angle of the view also harks back to Rivera's sustained study of Cézanne's pictorial ideas as does the overall, self-consciously schematic quality of the composition.
With what is now known about Rivera's early career, it can readily be seen just how brightly Cézanne's guiding star shines over this most "baroque" of Rivera's post-Cubist, and geometrically-based, experimental works.
Dr. Ramón Favela
March 16, 1995
Santa Barbara, California