Lauded as one of the most important periods of Picasso’s career, the year 1932 proved an incomparably fertile t.mes for the artist. Painted just before Valentine's Day, on the 13th of February 1932, Compotier et guitare is a triumph of the artist’s oeuvre and an ode to one of Picasso’s most indelible muses, Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Picasso first encountered Marie-Thérèse (see fig. 1) outside a shopping mall in Paris in January 1927. Her innate innocence, Grecian profile and voluptuous, athletic figure immediately caught the artist’s attention. As Marie-Thérèse later recounted, “I knew nothing—either of life or of Picasso... I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, 'I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together'” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso and the Weeping Women, 1994, p. 143). The chance meeting would prove the catalyst for a decade-long affair and would alter the course of Picasso’s life and work, leading to some of the most iconic images of his career.

The 25th of October 1931 marked Picasso’s fiftieth birthday, an age defined by a wellspring of creative energy inspired by his lover and muse. For a man whose fear of mortality was outweighed only by the conviction in his own legacy, this milestone came as a gauntlet to be conquered. Plans were soon made for a sprawling retrospective of his work to be held at Paris’ Galerie Georges Petit in the spring, with Picasso as chief curator. Though the exhibition was a commercial endeavor, the massive undertaking was more akin to a museum retrospective—one which, fittingly, traveled to the Kunsthaus Zurich later in the fall. The extensive exhibition featured 225 works in total and opened on the 15th of June 1932—a year to the day after a major show of Henri Matisse’s work was inaugurated at the same gallery.

For Picasso, the 1931 exhibition of Matisse's work had reawakened an age-old rivalry, and spurred the artist to reassert his primacy in the Modern canon. While Matisse's show was well attended, critics slighted the artist for the exclusion of his earlier masterpieces in favor of the recent Nice paintings and works primarily from dealers’ stocks. With such critiques at the front of his mind, Picasso exerted great care in selecting and positioning his own works when the t.mes came for his retrospective the following year.

From December 1931 to April 1932, Picasso executed more than thirty new paintings intended for the upcoming retrospective. Historian Jack Flam later described this exuberant period as a t.mes of “manic energy” and “appropriation of Matisse's style and subject matter [which] grew out of his desire to produce an ecstatic outpouring of painted love poetry to Marie-Thérèse” (Jack Flam, Matisse and Picasso, 2003, p. 155). Works like Compotier et guitare provided a direct riposte to Matisse, whose odalisques from the 1920s garnered much acclaim and admiration just a few years earlier.

The present work captured the sumptuous palette of gold, vermillion and viridian utilized in Matisse’s Odalisque couchée from 1926 (see figs. 2-3) and reiterated its patterned background and arabesque curves. With Compotier et guitare, Picasso reimagined the reclining nude as a still life, with the curves and lines of the bowl, drapery and instrument echoing Matisse's odalisque in reimagined forms.

Such works, alongside his nudes from the same year and earlier still lifes proved a resounding success. The opening reception of Picasso’s show was a fêted affair, attracting an array of high society figures, artists, dealers and critics from around Europe and resembling the sort of blockbuster event which, though common today, was unique for a living artist at the t.mes . Carefully selected by Picasso himself, the artist's 1932 paintings—including Compotier et guitare (see fig. 4)—were hung alongside earlier works and Cubist masterpieces, attesting to their originality and importance within his oeuvre. Attendees marveled at the staggering scope of Picasso's corpus and the “tour de force of [the] creative imagination of one man” (collects or Rees Jeffreys quoted in Exh. Cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, Picasso. His First Museum Exhibit, 2010-11, p. 77).

While the bold palette of Compotier et guitare is largely indebted to Matisse, the inspiration for this work and nearly all his paintings from 1932 stemmed directly from his l’amour fou with Marie-Thérèse. The covertness of their liaison had only intensified Picasso's infatuation over the years, his growing obsession with the young woman resulting in increasingly erotic imagery. The intoxicating ardor culminated in 1932 with a suite of monumental canvases featuring sensual still lifes and seductive nudes that irrefutably affirmed Marie-Thérèse’s presence in Picasso’s life.

The blonde hair, lunar profile and undulating curves of Picasso's 'Golden Muse' proliferated across medium and genre in the artist’s oeuvre, her distinct features becoming ever more sexualized and apparent. Compared to the earliest allusions to his mistress, the paintings from 1932 are emphatically Marie-Thérèse. By this t.mes , the cryptic lettering and subtle profiles in works from 1927 and 1928 (see figs. 5-7) had transformed into the sweeping curves of the fruit bowl and guitar in the present work. Paintings from 1931 and 1932 became imbued with the overtly phallic forms seen in his plaster sculpture from the same t.mes (see fig. 8), and even his still lifes took on the seductive qualities of his lover.

In the present work, the three pieces of fruit rendered in pale yellow and lavender serve as direct references to Marie-Thérèse. Standing in contrast to the audacious reds and emphatic contour lines of the rest of the work, the gentle palette of white, yellow and purple at left of the composition is a hallmark of Picasso’s depictions of his muse. Characterizing works like Femme dans un fauteuil (Le rêve) and Nu au fauteuil noir (see figs. 9-12), the soft colors delineating Marie-Thérèse's figure speak to her sweetness and docility.

Among the most prominent forms in the present work is the large two-toned guitar at the right of the composition. While the symbol of the guitar had long appeared in Picasso’s work and often in suggestive contexts, the present composition presents the object in a highly sexualized manner, as the curved neck of the instrument seems to penetrate the swelling body of the guitar.

By contrast, the delicately rendered fruits—themselves a t.mes less emblem of fertility—echo his lover's breasts and navel as exemplified by the comparison with Picasso's Nu couché, now at the Musée Picasso in Paris (see fig. 13). Connected by the green drapery, these curvilinear forms combine to trace the outline of Picasso’s slumbering muse.

Furthermore, the pale spheres also recall the phases of the moon, another symbol often associated with Marie-Thérèse. In Spanish, “la luna” not only refers to the moon, but also denotes the large plate of a mirror – a device seen in a number of Picasso's 1932 compositions. While the recurrent diamond-patterned wallpaper alludes to the tapestries within Matisse’s work, the dramatic contour lines in works like Compotier et guitare, and Jeune fille devant un miroir (see fig. 15) also create a stained-glass effect, furthering the motif of the window and looking glass and playing on notions of perception and reality.

Such a complex and monumental work is accompanied by an equally illustrious provenance. Shortly after the 1932 exhibition, Compotier et guitare entered the collects ion of Paul Rosenberg, one of the twentieth century's most influential dealers. A few years later, the critic, patron and friend of the artist Douglas Cooper acquired the painting from Rosenberg in exchange for Paul Cézanne's La Préparation du banquet, now held in the The National Museum of Art in Osaka (see fig. 16).

An esteemed intellectual and collects or, Cooper was the first scholar to write a major history on the Cubist movement. In all, his collects ion totaled nearly 150 works—many of them Cubist compositions—which came from the distinguished collects ions of Zoubaloff, Kahnweiler and Léonce Rosenberg. The present work remained in his collects ion until his death in 1984, after which it was inherited by his long-t.mes partner, designer and philanthropist William "Billy" McCarty-Cooper (see fig. 17).

One of only two finished paintings executed in February of 1932, Compotier et guitare marks the culmination of years of pent-up desire and coded imagery, and exists as the last major work before the parade of plaster heads and lilac-hued reclining nudes which dominated his creative output in the ensuing months. Appearing at auction for the first t.mes in more than 20 years, the present work is a triumphant encapsulation of the modern era—both a challenge to his contemporaries and the status quo and an homage to one of the greatest loves of his life.