Pablo Picasso
Nature morte à la cafetière, 1947
Oil on canvas
31 7⁄8 x 39 3⁄8 inches (81 x 100 cm)
Signed Picasso (lower left); dated 6.4.47 (on the reverse)
© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The objects that go into my paintings are… common objects from anywhere: a pitcher, a mug of beer, a pipe, a package of tobacco, a bowl, a kitchen chair with a cane seat, a plain common tabl —the object at its most ordinary.
– Pablo Picasso, quoted by Françoise Gilot in Life with Picasso, 1964
Pablo Picasso’s Nature morte à la cafetière (Still Life with Coffeepot) was painted two years after the Second World War had ended and four years after the liberation of Paris. He had created a number of still lifes during and immediately after the war, all of which are characterized by an austere palette, and included references to death in the form of skulls, bones, leeks, knives, and pitchers. Charged with symbolic significance, these objects served as memento mori during a time of great uncertainty in Europe. The present work retains some of the browns and grays used by Picasso to depict the mood of the period but evinces a concentrated glimmer of hope with the inclusion of a vibrant blue coffeepot. Depicted atop a table alongside another ambiguous item—perhaps a lamp or vase— the painting is charged with geometric dynamism through the artist’s rendering of the objects from a variety of angles, in a style reminiscent of his earlier Cubist works. Indeed, not since his Cubist period had Picasso been so engaged with the still life format as he was during the war and postwar years.
Combining thick black outlines with highly geometric shadows to convey pictorial space, the simplicity of color and contour recall Picasso’s remark to the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in 1944 that “his pictures, whatever their subject, always express his affinity for an individual form.”