Still life in the caned chair

The Still life with the caned chair is a work of Picasso, created in 1912. Historically it is the first joining ever carried out and opens the way with the artists of the Dadaïsme and the Surréalisme which will make this technique, their delight.

Mix of oil, oil-cloth and fabric on a framed support of cord. This work introduces for the first time “joining”. It is also called: “Glass, pipe, lemon, knife, scallop”.

The trompe-l'oeil is used here in a way more revolutionary than during the former experiments. Picasso carried out this fabric by remembering the practice that had his/her father to attach to his fabric of the pieces of other paintings in order to cause new ideas or effects. It carries out a still life which it locates in a coffee, and made up of a lemon, glass, an oyster, a newspaper and a pipe, then it applies an end of oil-cloth to reason for cane-bottoming, intended to evoke in a strange way the presence of a chair.

This composition is the result of various techniques. The lemon and glass, on the right are treated “analytically”, while on left, the pipe of the pipe is returned in a realistic way and it is placed as if it emerged through letters “JOU” of newspaper. The piece of oil-cloth stuck on the support is partly covered by shades or scratches with color so that the lower part gives the impression to be on a different level. A simple cord of sailor is used as framework with the table. The relief of this twisted cord reproduces the gallon of a visible tablecloth on photographs of the workshop of Picasso.

Picasso thus transgressed the guns of the traditional esthetics which imposed the homogeneity of materials in pictorial works. That amounted introducing into the work of art of the heterogeneous fragments of significant reality. Thus, the painter simultaneously became it able to illustrate and destroy the space illusion which conditioned all painting. By introducing the element “Objet trouv3e” (done everything), in fact the cane-bottoming of the chair, truth only seemingly, it invented a new manner of representing reality. The letters of the newspaper were not intended for information, but for esthetics and the symbol. The objects painted with dimensioned, which did not imitate anything the whole, took the truest aspect of painting. Picasso made use of the pictorial illusion with a precise aim to denounce of it falseness, or at least ambiguity, and consequently to destroy it.

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