 Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) Fan, Pipe, and Glass, 1911 Oil on canvas Purchase, Academy Fund and gift of the Friends of the
Academy, by exchange, 1969 (3576.1) Between 1907, the year of his revolutionary work Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Museum of Modern Art,
New York), and 1916, Pablo Picasso, together with
Georges Braque, worked on solutions to the problems
inherent in Cubism. He was concerned not only with the
two-dimensional depiction of the three-dimensional
aspects of reality but also with a world in constant flux,
and he sought to portray multiple aspects of objects by
simultaneously breaking them down and reconstituting
them. An abstraction of a traditional still life, this painting is
representative of Cubism's early, "analytical" phase, in
which color was suppressed and form was translated
into lines and shapes that signify objects in their many
aspects. To the left, a white clay pipe hovers above a
folded fan resting on a table; two reassembled glasses
and schematic references to stringed instruments
complete the composition. In works such as this
Picasso has attempted to balance signs of external
reality—inanimate objects—with a new spatial
structure. By introducing a fresh way of depicting the
increasingly complex world, he altered the course of
Western art. |