Lot Essay
During the summer of 1922, while he was staying in Dinard, Brittany, Picasso began painting a series of still-lifes in a purely colourist style. The series amounts to some thirty mainly small format canvases amongst which there are a handful of larger pieces including the present painting Verre, Bouteille, Poisson.
The style of these paintings clearly develops out of Picasso's Cubist experiments of the previous years but, with the sobriety of the pre-War period behind him, Picasso now uses pure colour and powerful linear black shading to express volume and space. In 1938 Gertrude Stein wrote:
"during this period his pictures were very brilliant in colour...the cubic forms were continually being replaced by surfaces and lines, the lines were more important than anything else, they lived by and in themselves. He painted his pictures not by means of his objects, but by the lines" (G. Stein, op. cit., p. 27-8).
Another characteristic of these still-lifes is Picasso's use of Ripolin paint. He had already experimented with Ripolin as early as 1909-10 but it was not until 1922 that he used it extensively. He was particularly attracted to the luminous quality of what was effectively a commercial high-gloss oil paint. It provided him with a strength and opacity of colour which perfectly suited the effect he was striving to achieve in these bold, planar still-life compositions.
Common to all the still-lifes from this series is also the sparsity of the objects Picasso uses in his compositions. The favoured motifs are wine bottles, glasses, fruit bowls, pipes and tobacco. Other works in this series include Guitare, Bouteille et Compotier, 1922, and Verre, Bouteille et Paquet de Tabac, 1922, now in the Kunstmuseum, Basle.
The style of these paintings clearly develops out of Picasso's Cubist experiments of the previous years but, with the sobriety of the pre-War period behind him, Picasso now uses pure colour and powerful linear black shading to express volume and space. In 1938 Gertrude Stein wrote:
"during this period his pictures were very brilliant in colour...the cubic forms were continually being replaced by surfaces and lines, the lines were more important than anything else, they lived by and in themselves. He painted his pictures not by means of his objects, but by the lines" (G. Stein, op. cit., p. 27-8).
Another characteristic of these still-lifes is Picasso's use of Ripolin paint. He had already experimented with Ripolin as early as 1909-10 but it was not until 1922 that he used it extensively. He was particularly attracted to the luminous quality of what was effectively a commercial high-gloss oil paint. It provided him with a strength and opacity of colour which perfectly suited the effect he was striving to achieve in these bold, planar still-life compositions.
Common to all the still-lifes from this series is also the sparsity of the objects Picasso uses in his compositions. The favoured motifs are wine bottles, glasses, fruit bowls, pipes and tobacco. Other works in this series include Guitare, Bouteille et Compotier, 1922, and Verre, Bouteille et Paquet de Tabac, 1922, now in the Kunstmuseum, Basle.