Estate of the artist 
Bernard Picasso, Paris
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris (acquired in 1980)
Private Collection, United States
Acquired by the present owners in 1990

Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Picasso Peintures 1901-1971, 1980, no. 9, illustrated in the catalogue 

The Picasso Project, Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, Neoclassicism II 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 24-033, illustrated p. 199

The canvas is in excellent condition and is unlined. Under UV light: there are two small spots of inpainting visible along the bottom edge in the lower left corner.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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"I want to tell something by means of the most common object," Picasso wrote of his still-lifes, "for example, a casserole, any old casserole, the one everybody knows. For me it is a vessel in the metaphorical sense" (quoted in Jean Sutherland Boggs, Picasso and Things (exhibition catalogue), The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art & Galeries Nationales du Grandꦑ Palais, Paris, 1992, p. 2).

Throughout his career, Picasso repeatedly turned to the traditional genre of still-life painting as a vehicle to disrupt pictorial conventions, and to push form to its limits. His Cubist enterprise prior to World War I fragmented and bifurcated form presenting several simultaneous views of rather conventional domestic objects. Then, in the spirit of the post-war "call to order," Cubist 🍸vocabulary was appropriated by Purism, which replaced the multiple depictions of bottles, guitars, and wine glasses with stability and precision, thereby providing a model of rational order in response to the War's senseless and profound destruction.

Although he rarely spoke about his paintings, Picasso commented on the liberties he took with his still-lifes: "It is a misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me... How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth!  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" (quoted in Christian Zervos, "Conversations avec Picasso," Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1935, pp. 173-74).  As the present work attests and John Richardson has observed, still-life was the genre which Picasso, "would eventually explore more exhaustively and develop more imaginatively than any other artist in history" (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. ll, New York, 1991, p. 441).