Pablo Picasso Still Life Prints For Sale

Picasso returned to the still life at almost every stage of his career, and the objects he chose were rarely grand: a saucepan, a jug, a candlestick, a lemon, a slice of watermelon on a table under a lamp. The Centre Pompidou notes that he was drawn to very ordinary things, worn plain by daily use, and records him telling Françoise Gilot that “the most everyday object is a vessel, a vehicle for my thought”. The same pitcher, candlestick and saucepan turn up across several of his paintings of the mid-1940s, so a kitchen table could become a stage that he rearranged again and again, and his printed still lifes carry that habit into editions that sit comfortably in a home.

Printmaking gave him new ways to build these tables, and the plainness of the subject suited the plainness of the materials. The linocuts of the early 1960s are the clearest example. The Norton Simon Museum explains that for Still Life with Glass Under the Lamp he worked a single block, printing a pale ground first and then cutting further into the same linoleum and inking it in a new colour, so that each pass added to the image and the finished print holds every stage at once. Linocut was often regarded as a craft for children and beginners, and Picasso used it for a large and powerfully composed still life, with soft, flowing cut lines that carry the curve of a lampshade, a glass or a piece of fruit. The colour aquatints and lithographs approach the same subjects differently, using tone, wash and drawn line to set a fruit bowl or a lemon beside a red jug with the loose confidence of a sketchbook study.

What links these prints is the way a few humble objects are made to hold a whole composition, with flat planes of colour, bold outlines and a table tipped towards the viewer so that everything on it can be seen at once. Collectors tend to find these among the most approachable of his works on paper, since a still life asks nothing of the viewer beyond looking, and the strong colour of the linocuts in particular brings the room to life.

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