“It is a misfortune—and probably my delight—to use things as my passions tell me…I put all the things I like into my pictures. Things, so much the worse for them; they just have to put up with it.”
Painted in 1936, after his triumphant return to painting after a year-long hiatus, Nature morte. Poissons et poêle is a humble yet delightful ode to the rhythms of quotidian life. By the middle of 1935, Picasso had taken a break from the brush, instead devoting his creative efforts to writing poetry. In this interstitial year, much of his Surrealist-influenced verses would incorporate the facets of life and the objects around him. Often his stream-of-consciousness effusions aggrandized and elegized the trapping he enjoyed on regular basis, including the foods and routines he savored.
Quoting Picasso’s secretary, the writer Jaime Sabartés, Marie-Laure Bernadac describes, “Picasso wrote in the kitchen—'at the table at luncht.mes …in the middle of so many hyperboles mixed with cheese and tomatoes’” (Exh. Cat., Cleveland, Museum of Art, Picasso and Things, p. 24). Having returned to painting a year later, his canvases carried on the lyrical legacy—his poetry, manifested.
"After all, the arts are one and the same. You can write a painting in words just as you can paint feelings in a poem."
In the present work, a frying pan sits precariously atop a variegated stack of fish and oyster shells. A staple among the prevailing painters of the genre (see fig. 1), the traditional white tablecloth provides a backdrop for the pictorial experimentation in the composition. Quite contrary to the literal translation of nature morte, this still life comes alive in the array of colors decorating the fish, the figures’ perky eyes animating the creatures as if they were still swimming freely.
The inventive spatial divides which evolved out of his earlier Cubist works and which carried on the ensuing decade (see fig. 2) are present in Nature morte. Poissons et poêle, with the conventionally round and organic shapes taking on more angular forms as they overlap, bob and weave within the composition. While inspired by Cézanne’s great compositional arrangements and feats of perspective, the impetus behind Picasso’s still lifes differed greatly from that of his predecessor. Whereas Cézanne gravitated toward apples in part for their hearty, long-lasting qualities and ready availability (see fig. 3), Picasso chose to paint his environs and the familiar subjects for which felt an especial affinity.
Bernadac continues, “Indeed under each pot, bowl of fruit, or guitar, there lurks a story, a person, or an anecdote that is part of the painter's life. Because of the autobiographical nature of his art, and because he assigned an equal value to the animal, mineral, plant, and human realms, he painted whatever was around him. When he was at the seashore, he painted fish and crustaceans” (ibid. p. 22).
The spirit of the still life would become ever more important in the following years as Europe once again entered wart.mes . Primarily relegated to his Parisian studio, Picasso focused more intently on his immediate surroundings, namely the objects which occupied his home and studio and the visage of his new lover Dora Maar.