Picasso, Pablo Vase, Bowl, and Lemon Paris, summer 1907 Oil on panel 62 x 48 cm Galerie Beyeler, Basel ©2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From "Picasso and Things," Cleveland Museum of Art:

"It is assumed that it was toward the end of painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" that Picasso produced this still life. There are drawings related to it in a notebook generally dated May-June 1907, whose graphic vocabulary - scratchy and parsimonious strokes of a pen harshly and energetically applied - is an effective equivalent in black and white for the texture of this painting. Picasso painted this still life on a rough panel, inadequately planed, so that its coarseness is an important part of the effect of the surface. There are even tiny dots of splattered paint as a result. The cold gray wall, the reddish brown tabletop, the dark green vase - striated however with light - the reddish bowl with the surprising golden lining, even the lemon, are humble domestic objects, but the heavy blue curtain, borrowed from the Demoiselles, is rarer stuff. Its blue echoes the sky, its fullness the drama of the curtain pulled aside to reveal the five demoiselles in the large painting. The lemon, which has touches of green and red, is placed as if it were an offering before the curtain, vase, and bowl, like the slice of melon, the grapes, and other fruit before the demoiselles.

"In the related notebook drawings the curtain is always drawn to suggest a certain turbulence, but the objects retain an axiality and equilibrium. It must be significant that in the painting that equilibrium disappears. The stormy gray wall slopes away from us. The plane of the table, more pink than brown, extends illogically perhaps as the floor beyond the objects, not providing much illusion of giving them any support. The vase and the bowl both list drunkenly, the golden chasm of the ellipse of the bowl, echoed by the lemon, eventually balancing the still life. They do not, however, reduce that sense of the unstable world in which these objects are placed, nor the intensity with which they are perceived.

"Understanding this hallucinatory still life is part of understanding the Demoiselles. It is savage in execution, deliberately evocative of certain mysteries in the transcendental use of light, which can suggest the draperies or the skies of El Greco, indebted to tribal art in its force but an affront to the significant axiality and the refinement of the execution of that art. The golden interior of the bowl can remind us of the unctuous porcelains of Limoges, but it can also recall the glories of Byzantium. The yellow lemon - domestic, familiar, reminiscent of the single lemon Manet placed on a plate or in a still life before his portrait of the critic and collector Theodore Duret - seems the rational link with the world we know. Both the ellipse of the bowl and the form of the lemon are in the shape of a seed or a womb. The mouth of the glass carafe in the notebook drawing has been broadened to produce a vase, but one more useful for Picasso's brushes than for flowers.

"In some ways this still life appears to be the work of a "wild man," a fauve, the label that was being used to identify the gentler works of Picasso's new friends Braque, Andre Derain, and in particular, Henri Matisse. It is significant that Picasso should have given this to Matisse before 1907 was over, a tribute perhaps to his influence, if only in having supplied an introduction to tribal art. It may be even more significant that Matisse, whose work never lost a sense of equilibrium and was never hallucinatory, should have chosen to sell this discordant still life."