Trois poissons

Picasso used the fish motif in his still-life paintings, but it was with his experiments in ceramics that the motif truly came alive and highlighted the playfulness of his creativity. His humour is expressed in his three-dimensional still-life ceramics with clay modelled fish attached to pre-maunfactured plates, taken from the sixteenth-century Palissy style and the popular Spanish platos de engano ('plates to fool the eye'). He also used the press-moulding technique with real fish bones to incise the motif onto plates.

Throughout Picasso's life, he experimented with the problem of how to represent three-dimensional objects on flat surfaces but with the ceramics, he now had to deal with the problem of painting on objects themselves. In this unique example, Trois Poissons, Picasso plays with illusion by trying to counteract the dip in the middle of the bowl with a shadow beneath the second fish, which is in turn disguised as the pattern on the third fish, bringing the second fish to life and making it appear to protrude out of the bowl. The imagery of the three fish can be traced back to the Ancient Greek tradition, particularly the fish plates in the Campanian style. However, instead of painting three fish around a central point, as in Greek examples, Picasso plays with form, cleverly integrating the three fish by repeating a simple shape using a neat thin line. These lines are incised into the plate, contributing particularly to the humorous character of the fish's eyes.



Sold with a photo-certificate from Claude Ruiz-Picasso.