Intaglio was Picasso’s first introduction to printmaking, and it remained a constant love throughout his long and prodigious career. For this still life, Picasso used a steel needle to draw, or rather to scratch into the copper plate, a composition in the analytical cubist style that he had created. The barely legible still-life elements are woven on scaffolding composed of diagonal lines, punctuated with curves and arcs that reveal the fragments of a bottle of brandy known as Marc, drinking glasses and playing cards. Areas of short, hatched lines float through the composition in free association with regard to their traditional responsibility of describing shadow, volume and spatial relationships.
The physical demands of etching a copper plate—concentration and dexterity—are matched by the intellectual rigor of Picasso’s cubist revision of traditional pictorial illusion. This drypoint, the artist’s first major cubist print, is a masterpiece of precision and economy; it is altogether striking for the wealth of recognizable detail Picasso achieves despite abstracting the forms to the point of extinction.
Details
- Artist Name: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
- Title: Still Life with Bottle of Marc
- Date: 1911
- Medium: Drypoint
- Edition: Edition of 100, No. 23
- Dimensions: 19-3/4 x 12 in. (50.2 x 30.5 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Jennifer Jones Simon
- Accession Number: M.2006.2.05.G
- Copyright: © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object Information
Picasso and His Printers
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2016-07-23 to 2016-11-27
Significant Objects: The Spell of Still Life
- Norton Simon Museum, 2012-07-20 to 2013-01-21
Etchings and Engravings by Master Printmakers: A Technical Approach to Intaglio Processes
- Norton Simon Museum, 1988-08-04 to 1989-01-22
Van Gogh to Picasso: Selected Master Prints from 1890-1960
- Norton Simon Museum, 1986-08-07 to 1987-04-26
Seven Decades of Picasso
- Norton Simon Museum, 1984 to 1986
The World of Picasso
- Norton Simon Museum, 1994-03-24 to 1994-11-06
Seven Decades of Picasso
- Norton Simon Museum, 1979-10-11 to 1980
Picasso: Graphic Magician, Prints from the Norton Simon Museum
- Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 1999-01-24 to 1999-03-28
- Toledo Museum of Art, 1999-11-07 to 2000-01-16
- Norton Simon Museum, 2000-04-12 to 2000-09-04
From Europe to California: Galka Scheyer and the Avant-Garde
- Norton Simon Museum, 2003-05-16 to 2003-10-13
- Fryberger, Betsy G. and Gloria Williams, Clinton Adams, David Carrier, and Pat Gilmour, Picasso: Graphic Magician, Prints from the Norton Simon Museum, 1998, p. 117
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