Lesson 30

Take this Picasso still life, “Jug, Candle and Enamel Pan” from 1945. Its subject is a group of domestic items, painted in his post-Synthetic Cubist manner. This work seems far from purely decorative. In French, still life translates as ‘nature morte’ – dead nature. Picasso also painted skulls at this time which is typical of a Vanitas still life. This work is also in the genre of a Vanitas painting, a ‘memento mori’. So, it is clear that the painting is about mortality. The works of this period reflect Picasso’s obsession and fascination with death. Picasso remained in German-occupied Paris throughout the war; his paranoia seems to have been exacerbated by the occupation and the omnipresent threat of death in the context of war.

This painting is not Guernica or some other large propaganda painting on the abhorrence of war, but the use of an intimate still life subject is in no sense a lightweight or a trivial genre. The painting has become to be seen as a reflection on the German occupation, ominous, foreboding, and uncomfortable. This painting was created in 1945 and though after the liberation of Paris and the unsettling days of the German occupation, his work of this time continued to allude to the fact that much of Europe and the East was still struggling through the horrors and consequences of war.

The lit candle could represent a ‘life giving’ element in the painting, of the ‘light’ of a liberated Paris in the midst of death and war, similarly a pitcher of water would also represent a ‘life giving’ aspect. However, such symbolism is not fixed, Picasso said, speaking of Guernica. “It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public must interpret the symbols as they understand them“.

Like beauty, the meaning of the work is in the eye of the beholder.

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