Impressionist and Modern Art Bonhams London

NOTE :

• Provenance
  Paul Rosenberg, Paris (acquired from the artist).
  Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York, no. 1520.
  Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, New York (acquired from the above in March 1965).
  Anon. sale, Christie’s, New York, 11 November 1992, lot 10.
  Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.Exhibited
  New York, Paul Rosenberg & Co., Picasso, An American Tribute, April – May 1962, no. 7.

  Literature
  C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Vol. III, Oeuvres de 1917 à 1919, Paris, 1949, no. 269 (illustrated p. 92).
  The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso’s Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture: From Cubism to Neoclassicism 1917 – 1919, San Francisco, 1995, no. 19-008 (illustrated p. 170).
  E. Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, New York, 2002, no. 293 (illustrated p. 347).

  Dated to 1919, Verre, paquet de tabac, carte à jouer was painted at a time when Pablo Picasso was relentlessly searching for a new style following the First World War, spurred on by both political events and personal changes in his life. Placed adjacent to other paintings from that particular year however, this canvas also illustrates the influence that the Cubist experiments of 1907 – 1914 still had on the artist and his lasting affection for the movement.

  Painted on an intimate scale and in rich, jewel-like colours, the present work feels more approachable and personal that the austere and multi-faceted ‘high’ Cubist works. The flattened perspective and tilted picture plane still very much look back to Picasso and Braque’s earliest experiments, but the handling of the paint and the structure of the composition are considerably more informal. The loose, swirling brushwork we see in the glass and tobacco sits alongside short dabs of paint which make up the blue, green and purple colour fields and recall the Pointillist style of Signac and Seurat, the latter of whose works featured in Picasso’s own collection at the time. The earlier strict geometric forms and subdued palette of Analytical Cubism have softened into a variety of colours and textures more akin to Picasso’s Synthetic paintings and collages such as Verre et paquet de tabac, Eté, from the summer of 1914.

  A more readable work, in Verre, paquet de tabac, carte à jouer we can identify the familiar motifs of tobacco, glass, playing card and table-top. The present work foreshadows a series of still lifes that Picasso would paint in the same year in its use of vibrant colour, but remains more conventionally Cubist in its tighter focus and setting. The artist spent the summer of 1919 in Saint-Raphaël with his wife Olga where he painted a series of small oils, watercolours and gouaches of objects arranged on a pedestal table (guéridon) in front of French doors flung open to reveal a blue sky and the Mediterranean beyond. Flooded with Southern sunlight, these compositions are considerably more open than the tighter framework of the present work, and demonstrate the smoother and more polished finish which heralded a reiteration of Cubism known as ‘crystal’ Cubism. This new tendency to stress the orderly and rational qualities of the Cubist aesthetic was part of the wider movement towards what Cocteau termed a rappel à l’ordre following the war, a style which found greater critical and commercial acclaim.

  The present work was painted in a climate of great change for Picasso – since his first experiments with Braque, many of his Cubist contemporaries had been drafted into the army and dispersed by the First World War. Braque himself was enlisted and severely injured, requiring a long period of recuperation. Picasso had also suffered the loss of his lover Eva Gouel Marcelle Humbert (known as Eva Gouel) in 1915 to cancer, followed by the death of his friend and advocate Guillaume Apollinaire from Spanish flu in 1918. The artist’s pre-war dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, attributed much of Picasso’s crisis of style to these great upheavals: ‘[After the First World War there was] an extraordinary change in Picasso’s painting. That change, which led Picasso at least partially toward a classicist painting, worried me greatly at the time. Since then I have realised a great many things, and I have understood a reason for this change. Picasso still tells me quite often today that everything that was done in the years from 1907 to 1917 could only have been done through teamwork. Being isolated, being alone, must have upset him enormously, and it was then that there was this change. Furthermore, I must tell you that in the spring of 1914 Picasso had shown me two drawings that were not cubist, but classicist, two drawings of a seated man. He had said, ‘Still, they’re better than before, aren’t they?’ This proves that this idea must already have been germinating in him then, but it had not reached the stage of painting’ (D.-H. Kahnweiler, My Galleries and Painters, London, 1971, p. 54).

  This ‘extraordinary change’ can be seen particularly in Picasso’s portraits of dancers, harlequins and bull fighters from 1918 which show a shift away from Cubist fragmentation to a smoothly modelled monumentality. This Neoclassicism extended to his still lifes, and in the same year as the present work was executed the artist painted the strikingly different Nature morte au pichet et aux pommes in whose clarity and immaculate finish we can read the influence of artists such as Ingres and Chardin; its chalky colours described by Robert Rosenblum as ‘dust over layers of history’ (Picasso: Challenging the Past, exh. cat, The National Gallery, London, 2009, p. 72).

  The Louvre reopened its doors in 1919 having recovered its collection which had been removed from Paris for safekeeping during the war, and there Picasso was able to revisit the works of the likes of Delacroix, Manet and Courbet. A trip to Italy in 1917 was also to prove pivotal for the artist – whilst working in Rome on the set and costume designs of Parade for the Ballet Russes he met the young ballerina Olga Khokhlova who was to become his first wife in July 1918. Both the sojourn in Italy and his new wife have been attributed with facilitating this shift in Picasso’s artistic style, as he was influenced both by the art of the antique and his partner’s more traditional tastes. Settling in a smart new apartment on the rue La Boétie on their return to Paris, the couple’s abode was dismissed by Picasso’s friends and associates as bourgeois and affluent compared to his earlier bohemian lifestyle. Encouraged by Olga to give up the Montparnasse cafés, Picasso maintained his own rooms within the otherwise conservatively furnished apartment, which he crowded with his familiar clutter and canvases. Elizabeth Cowling believes it must be significant that soon after he moved into the new apartment he produced a group of still lifes to which the present work belongs, ‘which are a continuation of the series of small paintings, papier collés and constructions depicting wineglasses he created in Paris just before war broke out’ and can be read as ‘a reminder of Cubism’s dissident past and as a goad to his dormant spirit of revolt’ (E. Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 347).

  Thus in 1919 we see Picasso investigating a parallel of styles which divided his admirers and even his patrons; each of the Rosenberg brothers for example held exhibitions of Picasso’s work in 1919, with Léonce showing only those Cubist works in the June show, and Paul Rosenberg the classical works in his one-man show in October. A close friend of Picasso as well as his dealer, the latter had lent the artist money on his return from honeymoon with Olga and found them their new apartment, and the present work comes from his own collection.

  Critics were quick to attack Cubism as a now-obsolete movement in the post-war landscape. The poet Blaise Cendrars (who had previously worked with Léger and the Delaunays) wrote an essay in May 1919 entitled ‘Why is the “Cube” Disintegrating?’, asserting that ‘one can already foresee the day, near at hand now, when the term ‘CUBISM’ will have ceased to have more than a nominative value, indicating in the history of contemporary painting the researches of certain painters between 1907 and 1914 […] Cubism no longer offers enough novelty and surprise to provide nourishment for a new generation’ (E. Cowling, op. cit., 2002, p. 341).

  Despite the turning tide against Cubism and his concurrent experiments with classicism, Picasso never fully abandoned the movement. He did not draw a line between his differing techniques, explaining that ‘my many styles…should not be considered as phases in an evolution…I have never made banal experiments. Every time I have had something to say, I have said it in the way in which I felt it should have been said. Different subjects require a different mode of expression’ (D. Porzio & M. Valsecchi (eds.),Picasso: His Life, His Art, London, 1974, p. 40). As illustrated by Verre, paquet de tabac, carte à jouer, Picasso ‘identified Cubism with still life, and still life with Cubism’ (E. Cowling, op. cit., 2002, p. 377).

  This work was formerly in the collection of Richard Rodgers, who along with his partner Oscar Hammerstein formed one of the twentieth century’s most successful musical partnerships. Rodgers and his wife Dorothy were avid collectors of works from a wide range of artists and time periods.

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