Poissons

Executed on June 10, 1955, and held in the same private collection since 1956, Pablo Picasso’s Poissons is an ode to tranquility. Filling the picture plane with gestural black marks, Picasso has depicted several fish swimming tranquilly within the darkened sea. The focus of the present work is a large, elaborately patterned specimen, with a lofty dorsal fin and fan-shaped tale, that dominates the center of the image. A bold cross pattern covering much of its body acts as graphic shorthand for the scales. The present work is one of three related scenes created that day, but fish had long served as a recurrent motif for Picasso, who included them in his earliest Cubist still lifes to later decorations for his ceramics.
Picasso drew Poissons at Villa La Californie, his new home in the hills overlooking Cannes that he shared with Jacqueline Roque. The couple had met a few years earlier, in 1952, when Roque was working as a sales assistant at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris where Picasso produced his ceramics. At the time, Picasso was still living with Françoise Gilot, but their relationship came to an end in 1953, when she left the artist to return to Paris with her two children. Shortly after her departure, Picasso took up with Roque, who remained a steady and loyal presence for the rest of his life. Initially, they moved into Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins in Paris, but, in 1955, decided to return to the South of France, where they purchased La Californie, the opulent nineteenth-century villa. Their years in Cannes coincided with a period of great serenity and productivity for Picasso, and life with Roque was calm, a sense evoked in Poissons, in which the fish all seem to coexist in harmony.