Picasso - Mug - Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table (1931)
Description
Porcelain mug depicting a work of Picasso, Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table (Grande nature morte au guéridon , 1931), preserved at the Musée Picasso of Paris.
Still Life on a Pedestal Table reminds one not only of Halley's painting, but also of that of another postwar American artist, Roy Lichtenstein, master of producing high art in the popular idiom of the comic book.
Halley said: "There's also a pop quality in Still Life on a Pedestal Table, and in other Picassos of the same period, that seems to me to be way ahead of its time. A lot of 20th-century artists - and actually I think of Matisse in this regard even more than Picasso - share the language of comic-book artists and cartoonists. Their works are flat, coloured-in, diagrammatic. Another thing that has always struck about Picasso's lines dividing colour areas is that the guy could really draw with a brush. It's a tough thing to do because the black line has to look like a positive mark, not a space between. But the colour areas it's dividing also have to have an edge that denotes them as a shape. And almost always he manages to draw those so that every form looks like a positive presence. That's real virtuosity. Contemporary painters sometimes try to do the same thing, and they always fall short. Picasso did it better than anyone."
Details
Dimensions: 3.22" x H. 3.62"
Material: Porcelain
Museum: Musée Picasso (Paris)