Perls Galleries, New York
Private Collection
Thomas Ammann Fine Art, Zurich
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above)

New York, Gallery Urban, Urban New York Part 1, 1988-89, illustrated in color in the catalogue
Rotterdam, Kunsthal, Picasso: Artist of the Century, 1999

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Supplément aux années 1920 à 1922, vol. XXX, Paris, 1975, no. 277, illustrated pl. 94
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 22-022, illustrated p. 9

The work is in very good condition. The canvas is not lined. The work is painted on a thick, burlap-like canvas, the weave of which has become visible throughout the white background. Under UV light: no in-painting apparent.
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Bouteille et compotier is one of a number of interior still lifes that Picasso painted in the early 1920s and demonstrates a style that developed out of the artist’s pre-war Cubist experiments. With the sobriety of the war years behind him, Picasso began to combine pure color with powerful linear black shading to express volume and space. In 1938 Gertrude Stein wrote: “During this period his pictures were very brilliant in color…the cubic forms were continually replaced by surfaces and lines, the lines were more important than anything else, they lived by and in themselves, he painted his pictures not by means of his objects, but by the lines” (Gertrude Stein, Picasso, London, 1938, pp. 27-28).

In the present work, Picasso combines both natural and Cubist elements, abandoning the decorative approach for a busy linearity and angularity of forms. Although the glass bottle and bowl of fruit have been reduced to plain geometric forms, the composition is enlivened by colorful patterns and thick horizontal and vertical lines resulting in a complex construction of flat, interlocking planes. Discussing this final phase of Picasso’s Cubism, John Richardson comments on these still lifes: “No longer did Picasso feel obliged to investigate the intricate formal and spatial problems that had preoccupied him ten years before. Instead he felt free to relax and exploit his cubist discoveries in a decorative manner that delights the eye” (John Richardson, ed., Picasso, An American Tribute (exhibition catalogue), Knoedler & Co🐠. (& other venu✨es), New York, 1962, n.p.).