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拍品專文
Picasso painted this intimately scaled still-life of an apple and a glass, with a paring knife behind them, in his Paris studio at 23, rue de la Boétie, during the spring of 1923. For the previous five years, since the end of the First World War, Picasso had been traveling two distinct stylistic avenues in his painting, neither of which seemed outwardly related to the other. Both nonetheless reflected the rappel à l'ordre, the humanist "return to order" that swept through the arts during the post-war period, which Picasso himself had helped instigate. This period in his production, on one hand, was named for the figures Picasso painted and drew in a "neo-classical" manner, having studied models from antiquity and channeled the linear precision he admired in the work of the 19th century paragon of classicism, Ingres. On the other hand, Picasso continued to explore, in the cubist mode of which he was a founding father and still its leading exponent and innovator, the possibilities of formal invention in the practice of still-life painting. Using the late synthetic cubist method of superimposing and overlapping flattened forms, Picasso has in Pomme et verre composed his objects--each reduced to a minimalist sign--within its own sand-infused, colored corona, and gathered them within a blue ovoid enclosure, creating a pictorial world set apart from everyday reality, which nonetheless projects a substantive if fictive presence all its own.
The idea of an overtly bifurcated studio production was then extremely controversial, and partisans of each manner tried to discredit Picasso's efforts in the other. The new classicists decried Cubism as a spent hold-over from the pre-war and wartime era, while outraged veteran cubists felt that in his classical works Picasso had betrayed the progressive mission of the avant-garde. Dadaists enjoyed belittling both points-of-view. To Picasso's mind, however, these contrasting notions were but the twin sides of the same coin, the totality of his art. He explained his method most simply in a statement to Marius de Zayas, published in 1923, which anticipated the pluralism of our own post-modern era: "I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them... Whenever I have something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said" (quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 5). Like any school of painting, Cubism possessed its intrinsic grammar, which was no less valid than that which informed the figure in its new, purely classical incarnation. If each concept was in fact viable in its own right, there was no good reason the artist should not practice them side-by-side.
Picasso painted large and elaborate compositions as major cubist statements, but also many more still-lifes in smaller easel formats, producing them in suites of a score or more canvases, Chardinesque in their character, featuring a few everyday objects, in which he followed an extemporized plan of formal procedures, like a skillful musician spinning off variations on a theme. Painted in the wake of some well-known classical portraits of his wife Olga and their son Paulo, and the painter Salvado costumed as a harlequin, this Pomme et verre belongs to a series of two dozen related compositions (Zervos, vol. 5, nos. 63-68, 72-83, 85-88, 90 and 92) Picasso completed before he and his family departed for a seaside summer holiday in Cap d'Antibes.
"Cubism is...an art dealing primarily with forms," Picasso declared (quoted in D. Ashton, op. cit., pp. 5-7). The still-life, historically ranked as the lowliest of painting genres, provided the ideal context in which to invent and express formal relationships in cubist terms. In the still-life the artist's subjects were the "least liable to the 'corruption' of anecdote, caprice, emotionalism and subjectivity," Cowling has explained. Still-life was "the genre which lent itself most readily to the demonstration of ideal and universal structural principles...the genre which, being more completely under the control of the artist than any other, was potentially the most conceptualized, the genre which, in short, was synonymous with Art in its purest, Platonic state" (E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 386).
The idea of an overtly bifurcated studio production was then extremely controversial, and partisans of each manner tried to discredit Picasso's efforts in the other. The new classicists decried Cubism as a spent hold-over from the pre-war and wartime era, while outraged veteran cubists felt that in his classical works Picasso had betrayed the progressive mission of the avant-garde. Dadaists enjoyed belittling both points-of-view. To Picasso's mind, however, these contrasting notions were but the twin sides of the same coin, the totality of his art. He explained his method most simply in a statement to Marius de Zayas, published in 1923, which anticipated the pluralism of our own post-modern era: "I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression, I have never hesitated to adopt them... Whenever I have something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said" (quoted in D. Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art, New York, 1972, p. 5). Like any school of painting, Cubism possessed its intrinsic grammar, which was no less valid than that which informed the figure in its new, purely classical incarnation. If each concept was in fact viable in its own right, there was no good reason the artist should not practice them side-by-side.
Picasso painted large and elaborate compositions as major cubist statements, but also many more still-lifes in smaller easel formats, producing them in suites of a score or more canvases, Chardinesque in their character, featuring a few everyday objects, in which he followed an extemporized plan of formal procedures, like a skillful musician spinning off variations on a theme. Painted in the wake of some well-known classical portraits of his wife Olga and their son Paulo, and the painter Salvado costumed as a harlequin, this Pomme et verre belongs to a series of two dozen related compositions (Zervos, vol. 5, nos. 63-68, 72-83, 85-88, 90 and 92) Picasso completed before he and his family departed for a seaside summer holiday in Cap d'Antibes.
"Cubism is...an art dealing primarily with forms," Picasso declared (quoted in D. Ashton, op. cit., pp. 5-7). The still-life, historically ranked as the lowliest of painting genres, provided the ideal context in which to invent and express formal relationships in cubist terms. In the still-life the artist's subjects were the "least liable to the 'corruption' of anecdote, caprice, emotionalism and subjectivity," Cowling has explained. Still-life was "the genre which lent itself most readily to the demonstration of ideal and universal structural principles...the genre which, being more completely under the control of the artist than any other, was potentially the most conceptualized, the genre which, in short, was synonymous with Art in its purest, Platonic state" (E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, p. 386).