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Lot Essay
It was predominantly with the still life that Pablo Picasso deconstructed the centuries-long tools of artistic representation in his epoch-defining movement, Cubism. In his desire to unpack and reconfigure the processes of representation, Picasso adopted this genre—one that is based more upon the immutable reality of the everyday world than any other—discovering that it offered him the greatest opportunity for his iconoclastic re-writing of convention. Volumetric vessels were split and rendered as floating compilations of lines, presented from multiple viewpoints at once; flat tabletops were upturned, distorting classical notions of pictorial space; pieces of fruit, so often the motifs with which an artist displayed their verisimitudinal virtuosity became nothing more than playful signs and shapes that alluded to rather than faithfully rendered real life. All of these objects became the protagonists in the new painterly world Picasso created in his cubist compositions.
Cafetière, tasse et pipe was painted in 1911, the highpoint of the artist’s Analytical Cubism phase, and captures to great effect the startling pictorial disruptions that Picasso so diligently crafted. Here, the just visible objects of an everyday still-life emerge from a monochrome mist of pigment. As the title denotes, a cafetière, cup and pipe, together with the prominent form of a wineglass, are the protagonists of the scene. Untethered from the tabletop on which they would usually stand, they float apparition-like amid various accumulations of shadows and gleams of light.
Writing about works such as Cafetière, tasse et pipe, Elizabeth Cowling has described, “In detecting and itemizing the scattered realistic details one risks reducing the paintings of 1910-1911 to diverting brain-teasers. In fact they remain mysterious and elusive, fascinating and intriguing, for no sooner has one small fragment emerged from the shadowy, shimmering, mazy whole to assume a momentary, almost tangible, reality than it becomes absorbed back into the abstract structure. This coming in and out of focus lends the objects in the paintings a hallucinatory, mirage-like quality, leading one to question one’s momentary impressions, to think of alternative interpretations, to wonder whether spectators will see what one believes has been seen” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 225).
At this time, Picasso’s cubist compositions had reached their most austere and hermetic point. Together with his friend and fellow cubist pioneer, Georges Braque, the artists had succeeded in painting a form of reality without resorting to any of the illusionistic tropes or visual tricks that had defined Western painting since the Renaissance. In the summer of 1910, Picasso had verged on creating canvases of total abstraction. Insistent that his art be based in the real world, he diverged from this path and began to reintroduce recognizable objects or “attributes” into his complex configurations of line and form.
The following summer, Picasso traveled to Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees, where he was soon joined by Braque. There the pair, so close at this time that Braque later described them as mountain climbers tied together on their artistic adventure, worked intensively in what has been described as a highpoint of both artists’ creative powers. Their work became so closely aligned that it was often hard to tell their canvases apart. It was also in Céret that Braque made a momentous breakthrough—adding stenciled letters onto the canvas, a motif that became essential to Cubism from this point onwards. “Although they were together for no more than three weeks,” John Richardson has written, “the two artists challenged each other to such good effect that—to revert to Braque’s mountaineering image—they finally made it to the summit. Over the next three years Picasso and Braque, sometimes singly, sometimes together, would conquer other peaks, but nothing would excel the feat they brought off at Céret, when the two of them pooled their prodigious resources—their very different skills and powers of invention and imagination, not to speak of Spanish duende and French poésie—to achieve parity. As Golding says, it was ‘a moment of poise and equilibrium’” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907 1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 193).
Returning to Paris, Picasso, who turned thirty that October, continued on this path of intense creativity. As with the Céret paintings, including L’Accordéoniste (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 277; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Le Poète (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 285; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) and La bouteille de rhum (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 267; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), it was the increasingly cogent structural armature of Picasso and Braque’s compositions that characterize their work of 1911. It was at this time—in the winter of 1911 as Zervos states, or the autumn according to Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet—that Picasso painted the present work. Here, the outlines and forms that trace the recognizable objects stand in perfect equilibrium with the rest of the composition, their forms echoing and reinforcing the geometric planes and lines that constitute the setting.
“In still lifes representing bar-tables covered with heterogeneous objects,” Pierre Daix has written of the 1911 works, “Picasso perfected the grid of slanting and vertical lines, then the pyramidal rhythm which gave the heroic period of Cubism its strength and lofty severity. The concrete elements are there merely to help the structural armature: the bottle for elevation, the glass for its curves… the structural rhythms emerged only slowly, through complex dynamics which linked the abstract forms to the concrete clues. In fact these rhythms acquired their structural value, became an armature, only in so far as they formed a system of concrete signs” (Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works, London, 1979, p. 84). This idea of conveying the “concrete signs” of an object would carry through to the new year. Indeed, this preoccupation manifested itself in the first cubist collage that Picasso created in early 1912—a bold leap forward that altered both the path of Cubism and modern art as a whole.
In the background of this moment of artistic invention, Picasso became embroiled in a now infamous controversy. On 23 August it was announced that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre. When an anonymous article was published in which the author claimed that theft from the museum was not difficult and that he himself had stolen some early Iberian figures from the museum, Picasso made a hasty return to Paris. He immediately realized the writer was Géry Pieret, an acquaintance of Guillaume Apollinaire’s—from whom Picasso had earlier purchased two Iberian statuettes. With no other leads, police investigated this angle intensively. Despite the anonymous return of the Iberian artefacts, Apollinaire found himself arrested for some days and Picasso was forced to testify in court. Despite this unfolding scandal, Picasso worked intensively throughout the autumn, creating works such as Cafetière, tasse et pipe, which constantly pushed forwards the artist’s cubist mission.
Shortly after it was completed, Cafetière, tasse et pipe was purchased by the renowned art collector Alphonse Kann. Born in Vienna in March, 1870, Kann earned a reputation as an elegant connoisseur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting in Paris during the opening decades of the twentieth century. A close friend of Marcel Proust, he was believed to have been one of the principal models for the character Charles Swann in the author’s 1908 novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Revered for his keen eye and extraordinary taste, he shocked the art world in 1927 by auctioning off the majority of his Old Master and antiquities collections in order to concentrate on the acquisition of 19th-century and modern art, which he pursued enthusiastically. By the late 1930s, Kann’s collection included at least thirty-five paintings by Picasso, in addition to numerous works by Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others.
As the threat of war loomed on the horizon, Kann fled Paris for England in 1938, leaving the majority of his art collection at his home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Western suburbs of the city. During the Occupation of Paris in 1940, the Kann mansion was pillaged by the German Army, as part of a series of systematic raids on the homes and businesses of French Jewish collectors. Hundreds of artworks were looted from his vast collection, while others were ‘Aryanized’ and sold at auction. Following the Allied victory in 1945, Kann attempted to recover the stolen artworks, but the destruction of his records meant that he had to draw up an inventory from memory alone. At the time of his death only about half of the artworks which were stolen from the house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye had been returned.
After its confiscation by the infamous Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Cafetière, tasse et pipe came into the possession of the art-dealer Gustav Rochlitz, who in turn sold the work to Isidor Rosner. Shortly thereafter the painting probably made its way back to Picasso, before entering the personal collection of Dora Maar, who received a number of works as gifts from the artist over the course of their relationship. It remained in her personal collection until her death. Extensive research by Alphonse Kann’s heirs during the late 1990s and early 2000s led to the successful restitution of several artworks which had formerly graced his collection, including Fernand Léger’s Smoke Over Rooftops, from the Minneapolis Museum of Arts, and Albert Gleizes’s Le Chemin (Meudon) from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Cafetière, tasse et pipe was restituted to the Kann heirs in 1999, and was purchased shortly thereafter by Si Newhouse.
Cafetière, tasse et pipe was painted in 1911, the highpoint of the artist’s Analytical Cubism phase, and captures to great effect the startling pictorial disruptions that Picasso so diligently crafted. Here, the just visible objects of an everyday still-life emerge from a monochrome mist of pigment. As the title denotes, a cafetière, cup and pipe, together with the prominent form of a wineglass, are the protagonists of the scene. Untethered from the tabletop on which they would usually stand, they float apparition-like amid various accumulations of shadows and gleams of light.
Writing about works such as Cafetière, tasse et pipe, Elizabeth Cowling has described, “In detecting and itemizing the scattered realistic details one risks reducing the paintings of 1910-1911 to diverting brain-teasers. In fact they remain mysterious and elusive, fascinating and intriguing, for no sooner has one small fragment emerged from the shadowy, shimmering, mazy whole to assume a momentary, almost tangible, reality than it becomes absorbed back into the abstract structure. This coming in and out of focus lends the objects in the paintings a hallucinatory, mirage-like quality, leading one to question one’s momentary impressions, to think of alternative interpretations, to wonder whether spectators will see what one believes has been seen” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 225).
At this time, Picasso’s cubist compositions had reached their most austere and hermetic point. Together with his friend and fellow cubist pioneer, Georges Braque, the artists had succeeded in painting a form of reality without resorting to any of the illusionistic tropes or visual tricks that had defined Western painting since the Renaissance. In the summer of 1910, Picasso had verged on creating canvases of total abstraction. Insistent that his art be based in the real world, he diverged from this path and began to reintroduce recognizable objects or “attributes” into his complex configurations of line and form.
The following summer, Picasso traveled to Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees, where he was soon joined by Braque. There the pair, so close at this time that Braque later described them as mountain climbers tied together on their artistic adventure, worked intensively in what has been described as a highpoint of both artists’ creative powers. Their work became so closely aligned that it was often hard to tell their canvases apart. It was also in Céret that Braque made a momentous breakthrough—adding stenciled letters onto the canvas, a motif that became essential to Cubism from this point onwards. “Although they were together for no more than three weeks,” John Richardson has written, “the two artists challenged each other to such good effect that—to revert to Braque’s mountaineering image—they finally made it to the summit. Over the next three years Picasso and Braque, sometimes singly, sometimes together, would conquer other peaks, but nothing would excel the feat they brought off at Céret, when the two of them pooled their prodigious resources—their very different skills and powers of invention and imagination, not to speak of Spanish duende and French poésie—to achieve parity. As Golding says, it was ‘a moment of poise and equilibrium’” (quoted in J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907 1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 193).
Returning to Paris, Picasso, who turned thirty that October, continued on this path of intense creativity. As with the Céret paintings, including L’Accordéoniste (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 277; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Le Poète (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 285; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) and La bouteille de rhum (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 267; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), it was the increasingly cogent structural armature of Picasso and Braque’s compositions that characterize their work of 1911. It was at this time—in the winter of 1911 as Zervos states, or the autumn according to Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet—that Picasso painted the present work. Here, the outlines and forms that trace the recognizable objects stand in perfect equilibrium with the rest of the composition, their forms echoing and reinforcing the geometric planes and lines that constitute the setting.
“In still lifes representing bar-tables covered with heterogeneous objects,” Pierre Daix has written of the 1911 works, “Picasso perfected the grid of slanting and vertical lines, then the pyramidal rhythm which gave the heroic period of Cubism its strength and lofty severity. The concrete elements are there merely to help the structural armature: the bottle for elevation, the glass for its curves… the structural rhythms emerged only slowly, through complex dynamics which linked the abstract forms to the concrete clues. In fact these rhythms acquired their structural value, became an armature, only in so far as they formed a system of concrete signs” (Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works, London, 1979, p. 84). This idea of conveying the “concrete signs” of an object would carry through to the new year. Indeed, this preoccupation manifested itself in the first cubist collage that Picasso created in early 1912—a bold leap forward that altered both the path of Cubism and modern art as a whole.
In the background of this moment of artistic invention, Picasso became embroiled in a now infamous controversy. On 23 August it was announced that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre. When an anonymous article was published in which the author claimed that theft from the museum was not difficult and that he himself had stolen some early Iberian figures from the museum, Picasso made a hasty return to Paris. He immediately realized the writer was Géry Pieret, an acquaintance of Guillaume Apollinaire’s—from whom Picasso had earlier purchased two Iberian statuettes. With no other leads, police investigated this angle intensively. Despite the anonymous return of the Iberian artefacts, Apollinaire found himself arrested for some days and Picasso was forced to testify in court. Despite this unfolding scandal, Picasso worked intensively throughout the autumn, creating works such as Cafetière, tasse et pipe, which constantly pushed forwards the artist’s cubist mission.
Shortly after it was completed, Cafetière, tasse et pipe was purchased by the renowned art collector Alphonse Kann. Born in Vienna in March, 1870, Kann earned a reputation as an elegant connoisseur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting in Paris during the opening decades of the twentieth century. A close friend of Marcel Proust, he was believed to have been one of the principal models for the character Charles Swann in the author’s 1908 novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Revered for his keen eye and extraordinary taste, he shocked the art world in 1927 by auctioning off the majority of his Old Master and antiquities collections in order to concentrate on the acquisition of 19th-century and modern art, which he pursued enthusiastically. By the late 1930s, Kann’s collection included at least thirty-five paintings by Picasso, in addition to numerous works by Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others.
As the threat of war loomed on the horizon, Kann fled Paris for England in 1938, leaving the majority of his art collection at his home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Western suburbs of the city. During the Occupation of Paris in 1940, the Kann mansion was pillaged by the German Army, as part of a series of systematic raids on the homes and businesses of French Jewish collectors. Hundreds of artworks were looted from his vast collection, while others were ‘Aryanized’ and sold at auction. Following the Allied victory in 1945, Kann attempted to recover the stolen artworks, but the destruction of his records meant that he had to draw up an inventory from memory alone. At the time of his death only about half of the artworks which were stolen from the house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye had been returned.
After its confiscation by the infamous Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, Cafetière, tasse et pipe came into the possession of the art-dealer Gustav Rochlitz, who in turn sold the work to Isidor Rosner. Shortly thereafter the painting probably made its way back to Picasso, before entering the personal collection of Dora Maar, who received a number of works as gifts from the artist over the course of their relationship. It remained in her personal collection until her death. Extensive research by Alphonse Kann’s heirs during the late 1990s and early 2000s led to the successful restitution of several artworks which had formerly graced his collection, including Fernand Léger’s Smoke Over Rooftops, from the Minneapolis Museum of Arts, and Albert Gleizes’s Le Chemin (Meudon) from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Cafetière, tasse et pipe was restituted to the Kann heirs in 1999, and was purchased shortly thereafter by Si Newhouse.