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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for nearly sixty years, Pablo Picasso’s Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase is a dynamic example of the artist’s approach to still-life painting during the final months of the Second World War. A modern vanitas, constructed from an arrangement of carefully selected items within the artist’s studio, the composition offers an intriguing and multi-layered meditation on the timeless subject of the still life. Playing with visual metaphors and symbolic allusions, the image at once pays homage to the history of the genre, while remaining deeply rooted in the precise moment of its creation.
At the outbreak of the War Picasso chose to remain in France. Refusing offers of sanctuary from friends and supporters in the United States and Mexico, he settled into a life of isolation in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins. His presence in Paris did not go unnoticed by the occupying forces. Labelled a “degenerate” artist during the Nazi campaign against modern art, several of Picasso’s artworks had been confiscated from German museums, while the success of his epic painting Guernica (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 65; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) led him to be considered a champion of the intellectual resistance to Fascism.
Although he was allowed to continue to work, the occupying forces forbade Picasso from exhibiting publicly, and he remained under close observation by the Gestapo, who visited his studio on a number of occasions. During these years, Picasso’s artistic vision turned inwards—as he later explained, it seemed “there was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly, and look forward to freedom” (quoted in H. and S. Janis, Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939-1946, New York, 1946, p. 4).
Still-life subjects became a central focus of Picasso’s paintings through the War, offering a glimpse into the Spartan conditions under which he lived and worked, as restrictions and rationing hit food and electricity supplies across Paris. Humble foods such as sausages and leeks appeared regularly in these works, occasionally alongside animal carcasses, their forms bathed in the dim glow of the candles that the artist used to punctuate the enveloping darkness. Coffee pots, small bowls of rare treats such as fresh cherries and brightly colored blooms made sporadic appearances, their presence suggesting the sudden availability of longed for items on the black market or in the small gardens that dotted the neighborhood around Picasso’s studio. Through the presence of these ordinary objects, Picasso captured a sense of both the deprivations and simple joys that marked life in the French capital for the duration of the conflict.
'[Picasso] endowed these inanimate objects with a soul, and in his works their life is neither still, nor silent… but garrulous and even dramatic at times." - Marie-Laure Bernadac
These familiar, quotidian items continued to play a central role in Picasso’s work in the months following the liberation of Paris by Allied forces. Through the spring of 1945, he worked with an impassioned energy on new compositions, primarily painting the immediate world around him—still lifes, portraits, and occasionally, views of the great monuments of Paris. On 10 March, he embarked upon a concentrated series of compositions that focused on the pairing of a skull and a jug or vase on a simple wooden table (Zervos, vol. 14, nos. 87, 88, and 93-100), revisiting a compositional theme that he had initially explored during the early 1940s. This time, instead of the dramatic planes of the sheep’s head that had been requisitioned by the artist in his earlier paintings, he chose to paint the hauntingly familiar curves and crevices of a human skull, invoking a momento mori element within his everyday environment.
This object took inspiration from Picasso’s sculpture Tête de mort (Musée national Picasso-Paris) conceived in 1943 and cast surreptitiously by the artist and his collaborators during the Occupation. Across the suite of canvases he worked on during the spring of 1945, the bronze skull is shown from different angles and profiles, its weighty and imposing form appearing like an ancient artefact unearthed and saved by the artist, standing in sharp contrast to the ordinariness of the simple, curvaceous jug displayed alongside it. As Jean Sutherland Boggs has noted, by focusing on the skull in these compositions, Picasso “represents the same issues of life and death as The Charnel House (Zervos, vol. 14, no. 76; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), but far more symbolically” as he grappled with the lasting consequences of war, even after the hostilities have ended (Picasso and Things, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992, p. 291).
While initially the artist focused solely on this pairing of cranium and jug, he soon added a trio of leeks to the table, their long, tubular forms and straggly roots expanding the dynamism of the arrangement. During a visit to Picasso around this time, Françoise Gilot noted the presence of these simple vegetables in his latest still-life compositions: “From the point of view of form, the leeks replaced the crossbones that traditionally accompany a skull, their onion-like ends corresponding to the joints of the bones,” she recalled (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 120).
"The joy I get from the odor of leeks…" - Pablo Picasso
When she quizzed the artist about them, Picasso responded, “What have leeks got to do with a skull? Plastically, they have everything to do with it. You can’t keep on painting the skull and crossbones, any more than you can keep on rhyming amour with toujours. So you bring in the leeks instead and they make our point without forcing you to spell it out so obviously” (quoted in ibid.). Arranged in a loose, crisscrossing configuration, the naturally soft, organic forms of the leeks acted as an intriguing visual counterpoint to the more solid, hardened, man-made forms of the jug and skull, the spring-green tones of their lower sections lending a vivid pop of brightness to the scene.
Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase is set against the blank expanse of the studio wall and includes a coal-oil lamp placed prominently at the front of the table, its light casting a warm glow that suggests the artist worked on the painting late at night. Picasso condenses the space in such a way as to make the walls, table, ceiling and floor appear to converge and overlap, framing the still-life arrangement in a series of sharp, geometric planes. Passages of vigorous brushwork dance across the canvas, transitioning from thick, directional strokes in some sections, to quick, loose, zig-zagging brush marks in others, lending a vivid sense of energy and texture to the composition. Along the lower edge of the canvas, Picasso plays with the materiality of his paints, thinning the black pigment that delineates the frame of the table and allowing it to drip freely downwards, which he then contrasts against the layers of thicker, impastoed paint alongside it.
Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase remained in Picasso’s studio through the rest of 1945 and into the following year. A photograph taken by Brassaï towards the end of November 1946 includes a glimpse of Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase placed on an easel in a corner of the artist’s studio, alongside a small table cluttered with paintbrushes and pigments. Around this time, Picasso took up his brushes and revisited the canvas, adding the finishing touches to the composition before dating the painting a second time, 6 December 1946.
At the outbreak of the War Picasso chose to remain in France. Refusing offers of sanctuary from friends and supporters in the United States and Mexico, he settled into a life of isolation in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins. His presence in Paris did not go unnoticed by the occupying forces. Labelled a “degenerate” artist during the Nazi campaign against modern art, several of Picasso’s artworks had been confiscated from German museums, while the success of his epic painting Guernica (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 65; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) led him to be considered a champion of the intellectual resistance to Fascism.
Although he was allowed to continue to work, the occupying forces forbade Picasso from exhibiting publicly, and he remained under close observation by the Gestapo, who visited his studio on a number of occasions. During these years, Picasso’s artistic vision turned inwards—as he later explained, it seemed “there was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly, and look forward to freedom” (quoted in H. and S. Janis, Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939-1946, New York, 1946, p. 4).
Still-life subjects became a central focus of Picasso’s paintings through the War, offering a glimpse into the Spartan conditions under which he lived and worked, as restrictions and rationing hit food and electricity supplies across Paris. Humble foods such as sausages and leeks appeared regularly in these works, occasionally alongside animal carcasses, their forms bathed in the dim glow of the candles that the artist used to punctuate the enveloping darkness. Coffee pots, small bowls of rare treats such as fresh cherries and brightly colored blooms made sporadic appearances, their presence suggesting the sudden availability of longed for items on the black market or in the small gardens that dotted the neighborhood around Picasso’s studio. Through the presence of these ordinary objects, Picasso captured a sense of both the deprivations and simple joys that marked life in the French capital for the duration of the conflict.
'[Picasso] endowed these inanimate objects with a soul, and in his works their life is neither still, nor silent… but garrulous and even dramatic at times." - Marie-Laure Bernadac
These familiar, quotidian items continued to play a central role in Picasso’s work in the months following the liberation of Paris by Allied forces. Through the spring of 1945, he worked with an impassioned energy on new compositions, primarily painting the immediate world around him—still lifes, portraits, and occasionally, views of the great monuments of Paris. On 10 March, he embarked upon a concentrated series of compositions that focused on the pairing of a skull and a jug or vase on a simple wooden table (Zervos, vol. 14, nos. 87, 88, and 93-100), revisiting a compositional theme that he had initially explored during the early 1940s. This time, instead of the dramatic planes of the sheep’s head that had been requisitioned by the artist in his earlier paintings, he chose to paint the hauntingly familiar curves and crevices of a human skull, invoking a momento mori element within his everyday environment.
This object took inspiration from Picasso’s sculpture Tête de mort (Musée national Picasso-Paris) conceived in 1943 and cast surreptitiously by the artist and his collaborators during the Occupation. Across the suite of canvases he worked on during the spring of 1945, the bronze skull is shown from different angles and profiles, its weighty and imposing form appearing like an ancient artefact unearthed and saved by the artist, standing in sharp contrast to the ordinariness of the simple, curvaceous jug displayed alongside it. As Jean Sutherland Boggs has noted, by focusing on the skull in these compositions, Picasso “represents the same issues of life and death as The Charnel House (Zervos, vol. 14, no. 76; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), but far more symbolically” as he grappled with the lasting consequences of war, even after the hostilities have ended (Picasso and Things, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992, p. 291).
While initially the artist focused solely on this pairing of cranium and jug, he soon added a trio of leeks to the table, their long, tubular forms and straggly roots expanding the dynamism of the arrangement. During a visit to Picasso around this time, Françoise Gilot noted the presence of these simple vegetables in his latest still-life compositions: “From the point of view of form, the leeks replaced the crossbones that traditionally accompany a skull, their onion-like ends corresponding to the joints of the bones,” she recalled (F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 120).
"The joy I get from the odor of leeks…" - Pablo Picasso
When she quizzed the artist about them, Picasso responded, “What have leeks got to do with a skull? Plastically, they have everything to do with it. You can’t keep on painting the skull and crossbones, any more than you can keep on rhyming amour with toujours. So you bring in the leeks instead and they make our point without forcing you to spell it out so obviously” (quoted in ibid.). Arranged in a loose, crisscrossing configuration, the naturally soft, organic forms of the leeks acted as an intriguing visual counterpoint to the more solid, hardened, man-made forms of the jug and skull, the spring-green tones of their lower sections lending a vivid pop of brightness to the scene.
Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase is set against the blank expanse of the studio wall and includes a coal-oil lamp placed prominently at the front of the table, its light casting a warm glow that suggests the artist worked on the painting late at night. Picasso condenses the space in such a way as to make the walls, table, ceiling and floor appear to converge and overlap, framing the still-life arrangement in a series of sharp, geometric planes. Passages of vigorous brushwork dance across the canvas, transitioning from thick, directional strokes in some sections, to quick, loose, zig-zagging brush marks in others, lending a vivid sense of energy and texture to the composition. Along the lower edge of the canvas, Picasso plays with the materiality of his paints, thinning the black pigment that delineates the frame of the table and allowing it to drip freely downwards, which he then contrasts against the layers of thicker, impastoed paint alongside it.
Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase remained in Picasso’s studio through the rest of 1945 and into the following year. A photograph taken by Brassaï towards the end of November 1946 includes a glimpse of Crâne, lampe, poireaux, vase placed on an easel in a corner of the artist’s studio, alongside a small table cluttered with paintbrushes and pigments. Around this time, Picasso took up his brushes and revisited the canvas, adding the finishing touches to the composition before dating the painting a second time, 6 December 1946.