Picassos fruar
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Pitcher and Fruit Bowl
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Galerie Paul Rosenberg (Paul Rosenberg), Paris, France [1]
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Rosenberg & Helft, London, England [2]
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Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York, NY, USA [3]
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Morton D. May (), St. Louis, MO, purchased from Paul Rosenberg & Co. [4]
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Saint Louis Art Museum, bequest of Morton D. May [5]
Notes:
[1] Christian Zervos and Pierre Guéguen describe a small exhibition held at Galerie Paul Rosenberg in , consisting of at least eight paintings by Picasso. Their comments are accompanied by images of three of the paintings, including the Saint Louis Art Museum's "Pitcher and Fruit Bowl" (labeled "Composition") [Zervos, Christian. "A Propos de la Dernière Exposition Picasso." "Cahiers d'Art" 6, no. (): p. ; Guéguen, Pierre. "Picasso et le Métapicassisme." "Cahiers d'Art" 6, no. (): p]. During the s, the painting was published as part of the holdings of Paul Rosenberg ["Picasso." Paris: Editions de Cahiers d'Art, ; Wadsworth Atheneum, " Pablo Picasso." Hartford, Connecticut: Wadsworth Atheneum, , cat. no. 69].
[2] By , the painting was co-owned by Paul Rosenberg and his brother-in-law Jacques Helft, under the auspices of the London gallery Rosenberg
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Pablo Picasso, 'Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin',
Although not the most recent painting in the National Gallery’s collection, this picture is perhaps the most self-consciously modern. It is also the Gallery’s only example of Cubism, the early twentieth-century art movement initiated by Pablo Picasso and his colleague Georges Braque, which radically transformed the visual arts, particularly through its rejection of single-point perspective. At first glance, the picture appears to be entirely abstract, but on closer inspection parts of several recognisable objects become apparent. Moving upwards from the bottom of the painting, these include a table (the curvy outline of one leg is just to the right of Picasso’s signature), an off-white tablecloth with grey tassels, the strings and neck of a violin, part of a newspaper (including the letters ‘AL’ of ‘JOURNAL’) and, at the very top, a dish of fruit.
Around , Picasso and Braque began to develop a new way of painting that became known as ‘analytical’ Cubism. Objects were broken down into facetted surfaces that combined multiple points of view. Following Cezanne’s example, t
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Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle, bygd Pablo Picasso
Violin and Bottle is typical of his Synthetic Cubism, in which he uses various means - painted dots, silhouettes, grains of sand - to allude to the depicted objects. This combination of painting and mixed media fryst vatten an example of the way Picasso "synthesized" color and texture - synthesizing new wholes after mentally dissecting the objects at hand.
During his Analytic Cubist phase Picasso had suppressed color, so as to concentrate more on the forms and volumes of the objects, and this rationale also no doubt guided his preference for still life throughout this phase. The life of the cafe certainly summed up modern Parisian life for the artists - it was where he spent a good deal of time talking with other artists - but the simple array of objects also ensured that questions of symbolism and allusion might be kept under control.