In 1912, Picasso and Georges Braque spent the summer months together in Sorgues, near Avignon. Their friendship began in 1908 and their exchange of ideas over the following years led to the birth of Cubism in 1909. They worked intensely together on this new visual idiom, refining and redefining it with astonishing speed. However, whilst its creation was collaborative, certain innovations can be credited solely to one artist or the other, and it was Picasso who first ‘pierced the closed form’ in 1910.
The summer in Sorgues was a turning point for both artists. It was Braque who came across a roll of faux bois wallpaper in Avignon which he incorporated in pieces into a series of charcoal drawings. Picasso was at first shocked by this new development but quickly began to incorporate the same fake wood-grain paper into his own work and so enabled the transition from analytical to synthetic Cubism. As John Richardson explains: 'Analytic cubism permitted the two artists to take things apart: dissect them "with the practiced and methodical hand of a great surgeon" (as Apollinaire said of Picasso) [...]. Synthetic cubism, on the other hand, permitted Picasso and Braque to put things together again, to create images and objects in a revolutionary new way, out of whatever materials they chose' (J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 1996, vol. I, p. 106).
The human figure, as demonstrated in the present work, provided Picasso with the perfect subject – an almost endless variety of lines, forms and volumes – to further his investigation of Cubism. The curvilinear shape of the smoker’s eyes, hands and cigarette are juxtaposed with the sharp angles and strong verticals of the figure’s body that centre the composition. Picasso’s use of the medium is expressive and free and lends the subject matter a particularly lively and vivid appeal. Indeed, while the artist continued his experimentation with linear perspective, he also wanted to convey modern life in the city at the t.mes . The fashionable act of smoking tobacco was a quintessential part of modern life in Paris in the early twentieth century and Picasso often included smoking and its paraphernalia in his work. Fumeur deftly captures the urbane sophistication of Parisian nightlife whilst at the same t.mes exemplifying the formal experimentation that would ensure Picasso's place in the history of art.
