Tino Rossi, Florence
Private Collection, Austria

Singapore, Opera Gallery, Masterpieces, The Ultimate Collection, 2007, illustrated in color

Wilhelm Boeck, Picasso, Stuttgart, 1955, no. 205, illustrated p. 477

Good condition. Executed on cream-wove paper. Attached to a mount at three places along top edge. All four edges are deckled. Half an inch matte stain around perimeter. The sheet is otherwise noticably time-darkened.
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Bouquet de fleurs is a wonderful example of Picasso's vibrant still-lives of the forties and fifties and a theme he would soon extend to the medium of sculpture (see fig. 1). The still life as an object of meditation is deeply embedded in art historical rhetoric, and its pervasive material presence in the oeuvre of modern masters such as Picasso is a testament to its endurance. In discussing Picasso's still-lives of flowers, Jean Sutherland Boggs notes that, "Ever since his commercial effort to paint flowers at the tender age of nineteen (or twenty) – over half a century earlier – Picasso had on the whole limited the role of flowers to grace notes in his drawings or etchings. It is interesting that in 1947 in another graphic form – this time lithography – he should have pursued modest bouquets of flowers, posies in tumblers of water. Curiously, at the time when Picasso's future biographer, John Richardson, who has recorded the artist's indifference to preserving flowers, must have met Picasso, the artist seems to have discovered the virtue of keeping flowers in water... the water line is often visible through the glass containers, and more significantly, the cut flowers have the kind of spirited life that water preserves" (Joan S. Boggs, Picasso & Things, Cleveland, 1992, p. 321).

Executed in May, 1948 while in the South of France with Françoise Gilot, a year after their son Claude was born, the scale and sheer energy of this work indicates Picasso's joie de vivre during these years. Though the work is solely ink on paper with no application of color, the dynamic composition of flowers are rendered with such vigorous bold lines that they are practically bursting out of the vase. In omitting their color, Picasso has in fact focused the viewer's attention on the vitality and energy of the still-life as a whole, resulting in an even stronger composition.

Fig. I  Pablo Picasso, Fleurs dans un vase, 1951-53, plaster, terracotta 🐷and iron, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas