Bottle, Glass, Fork

1911–12

Pablo Picasso

(Spanish, 1881–1973)

Spain, 20th century

oil on canvas

Framed: 92.4 x 75.9 x 8.3 cm (36 3/8 x 29 7/8 x 3 1/4 in.); Unframed: 72 x 52.7 cm (28 3/8 x 20 3/4 in.)

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund 1972.8

Location: 223 20th Century Avant-Garde

This artwork is known to be under copyright.

Did You Know?

Just before the First World War, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented a radically new kind of painting that dispensed almost completely with visual resemblance to the world, substituting an intellectual method of abstraction that challenged every convention and created a revolutionary conception of space, even a redefinition of reality in art.

Description

This still life depicts a variety of objects found on a café table: a bottle, glass, folded newspaper, and utensils. Intricate in its composition and subtle in palette, this painting exemplifies Analytic Cubism, an artistic style devised by Picasso and Georges Braque between 1908–12 characterized by the fragmentary appearance of multiple, simultaneous viewpoints and overlapping planes. Maintaining a connection to the real world, Picasso inserted letters and numbers with personal and political meanings. The “fe 20” could refer to the word “café” and a street address. “EAN” above [P] ARIS may allude to the newspaper L’Intransigeant founded in 1880 in Paris; but ultimately, the meaning of these fragments remains mysterious and known only to the artist.