Pablo Picasso

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

Jean Planque, Paris

Jane Wade, Ltd., New York

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1966 and sold: Christie's, New York, November 6, 2007, lot 71)

Richard Green Fine Art, London (acquired at the above sale)

Acquired from the above in March 2008

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Picasso, Works from 1932-1965, 1967, no. 26, illustrated in color in the catalogue

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, vol. 14, Paris, 1963, no. 5, illustrated pl. 3

Carsten-Peter Warncke, Pablo Picasso 1881-1973, vol. II, Cologne, 1994, illustrated in color p. 462

This work is in very good condition. Original canvas. There are a few tiny paint-losses in the extreme lower right corner. There is a very small area of retouching to the upper left corner visible under ultra-violet light. Please note that the consignor purchased the present work from Richard Green Fine Art, London in 2008, who had acquired it at auction in 2007.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Painted under cover of darkness in his studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, this work is one of Picasso's nocturnal still-lifes from the war years. Because of the confining circumstances of occupied Paris, Picasso made a habit of painting at night or behind heavily shaded windows, and the chromatic severity of his pictures from this time conveys the ambiance under these conditions.  Verre et pichet belongs to a series of pictures that Picasso completed in the summer of 1944, just as the occupation was about to end.  The present work, which the artist began on Bastille Day, is a particularly vibrant example with a pitcher of lemonade, and it is more structured and polished than many others in this series.  The elements of the composition are linked through a series of diagonal lines, with pitcher, window, lemon and table all rendered in adjoining triangles.

In the years following the war, Picasso was criticized by some of his contemporaries for the lack of open political engagement in his art. Rather than a vehicle for documenting the destructive reality that surrounded him, painting was for him a world of creativity into which he could escape, and his works of this period certainly express Picasso's state of mind in his own artistic language.  "It is not time for the creative man to fail, to shrink, to stop working," Picasso told Sidney and Harry Janis of his experience in occupied Paris.  "There is nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly and look forward to freedom" (Picasso, quoted in M. McCully, ed., A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, Princeton, 1997, p. 224). 

Frances Morris wrote about the symbolism of Picasso's still-lifes of the early 1940s: "Above all it was the still-life genre that Picasso developed into a tool capable of evoking the most complex blend of pathos and defiance, of despair to hope, balancing personal and universal experience in an expression of extraordinary emotional power. The hardship of daily life, the fragility of human existence and the threat of death are themes that haunt Picasso's still-life paintings of the war and Liberation periods" (F. Morris, Paris Post War, Art and Existentialism 1945-1955 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 155).