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拍品專文
Dating from the end of January 1937, Nature morte à la bougie shows dark objects against a stark white background, reflecting the artist's anxieties at the Civil War that was tearing apart his native Spain at the time. This month in particular was a turning point for Picasso, who was being encouraged to submit a work for the Spanish Republican Pavilion for the Paris International Exhibition which would take place later that year. Soon, the artist would accept the challenge and would paint the legendary Guernica.
Picasso was often loath to commit himself politically, yet during this month he produced several works that directly aided the Republican cause, and which also sometimes mocked Franco and his followers. While Nature morte à la bougie does not overtly show any political content, its austerity nonetheless conveys the artist's own angst at the situation. In the bleak background, the jutting angularity of the various elements and the flame itself, Picasso has condensed his hopes and fears, the candle's glow providing a colourful glimmer of optimism within this stark context. At the same time this flame, which could be blown out at any time, introduces the sense of a memento mori to the picture.
Nature morte à la bougie is one of a series of paintings on the same theme that Picasso executed at the end of January in 1937. Depicting the same subject again and again was a technique that the artist often employed, for instance in the portraits of Dora Maar that were being painted at precisely this time, in order to explore his own feelings. The variations in the different pictures, either of Dora or of the candle and pichet, bear witness to an emotional journey on the artist's part. The elements in the present painting, which reappear throughout this small series, are therefore the vessels in which the artist has poured his anxieties, venting through repeated, mantra-like depictions of the same view. Thus, while this is on the one hand a charming and colourful still life painting showing an Old Master-like grouping of objects, it is permeated with its own context. However absent from the composition, or from Picasso's studio, the Spanish Civil War nonetheless pervades this painting.
Picasso was often loath to commit himself politically, yet during this month he produced several works that directly aided the Republican cause, and which also sometimes mocked Franco and his followers. While Nature morte à la bougie does not overtly show any political content, its austerity nonetheless conveys the artist's own angst at the situation. In the bleak background, the jutting angularity of the various elements and the flame itself, Picasso has condensed his hopes and fears, the candle's glow providing a colourful glimmer of optimism within this stark context. At the same time this flame, which could be blown out at any time, introduces the sense of a memento mori to the picture.
Nature morte à la bougie is one of a series of paintings on the same theme that Picasso executed at the end of January in 1937. Depicting the same subject again and again was a technique that the artist often employed, for instance in the portraits of Dora Maar that were being painted at precisely this time, in order to explore his own feelings. The variations in the different pictures, either of Dora or of the candle and pichet, bear witness to an emotional journey on the artist's part. The elements in the present painting, which reappear throughout this small series, are therefore the vessels in which the artist has poured his anxieties, venting through repeated, mantra-like depictions of the same view. Thus, while this is on the one hand a charming and colourful still life painting showing an Old Master-like grouping of objects, it is permeated with its own context. However absent from the composition, or from Picasso's studio, the Spanish Civil War nonetheless pervades this painting.