Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Tasse et bananes

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Oil on panel
27 x 21.3 cm (10 ⁵/₈ x 8 ³/₈ inches)
Signed on the reverse, Picasso
Executed in 1908

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Provenance

Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris
Roger Dutilleul, Paris
Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Eugene and Dorothy Prakapas, New York, acquired from the above in November 2000
Thence by descent
Literature

Françoise Cachin, Tout l'œuvre peint de Picasso, 1907-1916, Milan, 1972, no. 169, pp. 95-96 (illustrated p. 95)
Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years 1907–1916, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Related Works, London, 1979, no. 208, p. 229 (illustrated; titled Cup and Fruit)
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso. Œuvres de 1906 à 1912, vol. 2, Paris, 1986, no. 100, pp. 48, 175 (illustrated p. 48)
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism (1907–1917), New York, 1990, no. 295, pp. 107, 499 (illustrated p. 107; titled Cup and Tuber; dated 1909)
Description

This original artwork by Pablo Picasso is available for immediate purchase.

This refined and profoundly elegant, pared down still life, is a museum quality painting dating from a pivotal, and arguably most radical moment in Picasso’s development and the foundation of the European Avant Garde. With a highly distinguished provenance, its reappearance is an exciting revelation of a golden gem of an oil by Picasso after being in private collections for decades. Painted only a year after Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, the watershed of Cubism (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York) this work is a highly sophisticated exploration of perspective and spatial relationships. In it Picasso places the rim of the teacup exactly at sight level, whilst the tabletop and fruit are seen on an incline. Partly borrowed from the innovations of Cezanne’s still lives, (where ellipses and table tops often do not align according to traditional perspective) which had been influentially exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1906, these differing spatial viewpoints within a single composition contain the essential philosophy of Cubism, seeing reality simultaneously from differing viewpoints, what Daix describes as “Cezannesque space and objectivity of the still lifes, Paris, Autumn 1908-Spring 1909 (Daix ibid. p. 227). In its aesthetic force, the razor-sharp portrayal of a horizontal edge seen in the cup here can be compared directly to Table with Loaves and Bowl of Fruit (early 1909), Daix 220, Kunstmuseum, Basle. During 1908 Picasso painted a small series of still lives of fruits, glasses, cups and bowls (Daix 198-208). Daix comments: “This nucleus of still-lives done in the autumn illustrates Picasso’s tendency to use small wooden panels measuring 27 by 21, which allowed him to work in gouache, tempera or oils: they demonstrate a greater attention to technique…soon there appeared a new tendency towards the exaltation of forms, but based now on what he had learned from his initial return to objectivity. “(Daix, ibid., p. 227).
One of these, 21 x 27 cm. panels was sold at Christies, New York, November 2013 4, 2013, lot 13, $2,629,000.

A rare example of Pablo Picasso’s early painterly practice, Tasse et bananes, 1908, sits at the precipice of Cubism. Experimenting with still lives at various stages throughout his practice, Picasso here relies on simple geometric shapes to inform his composition, which anticipates the artist’s more abstracted later works. Using a neutral color palette of golden browns, terracotta and pops of green to render the cup, banana and background, the shapes and forms blend into one another, creating a harmonious, geometric scene that blurs the lines between objects and space, ideas which foreshadow his later Cubist output.

Artist's Biography

Perhaps the greatest and most influential modern artist of the twentieth century, Spanish artist Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Málaga in Andalusia, son of an artist and curator with aristocratic roots. Trained by his father, Picasso spent his adolescence in Barcelona before briefly attending the prestigious Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal renown and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments; known for co-founding the Cubist movement, inventing constructed sculpture and co-inventing collage. Picasso's work is often categorized into periods, most commonly accepted as the Blue Period (1901–1904), the Rose Period (1904-1906), the African Period (1907-1909), Analytical Cubism (1909-12) and Synthetic Cubism (1912-19). Some of his work dating from the 1910s and much dating from the early 1920s were executed in a Neoclassical style. Picasso’s work from the mid-1920s often possesses the characteristics of Surrealism, whilst his later work combines elements of his earlier styles. Among his most famous and iconic works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) inspired by Iberian and African sculpture; and Guernica (1937) a haunting poem on the Fascist bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

At the time of Picasso's death many of his paintings were in his possession. In addition, Picasso had a considerable collection of the work of other famous artists, some his contemporaries, such as Henri Matisse with whom he has exchanged works. Since Picasso left no will, his death duties (estate tax) to the French state were paid in the form of his works and others from his collection. It is these works that form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. As of 2004, Picasso remained the top-ranked artist (based on sales of his works at auctions) and on 21 June 2016 a painting by Pablo Picasso titled Femme Assise (1909) sold for £43.2 million ($63.4 million) at Sotheby's in London, setting a world record for the highest price ever paid at auction for a Cubist work.

Pablo Picasso