Still-life with Chair Caning

Pablo Picasso

Still-life with Chair Caning

Oil on oil-cloth over canvas edged with rope

29 × 37 cm

1912

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) created over 22,000 pieces of work during his career. These pieces included paintings, sculpture work, and a series of graphic design work which he had created over the course of his career. Over the extensive career, Picasso had a hand in every art form and movement that came through, during the 20th century. Not only that, he also co-founded cubism, which was one of the most popular movements during the 20th century, and was what he was most well-known for with most of the works he created. Comical and fantasy were the types of work that Picasso focused on, as his career moved forward, and as he drew closer to the end of his career. Graphic arts, ceramics, and sculpture work, were the methods that he drew on most, as opposed to painting and etched works, which were the predominant choices early on in his career. During this time, he produced thousands of stage designs, illustrations, and a series of drawings, which represented these themes, and distinct styles.

Compositionally, this image uses strong dark line to break up and segment the varying elements dissecting them. The viewer’s eye is drawn from the far left of the composition at the lettering, to roll around the circular shape created by the rope, to the bottom right, essentially beginning with the chair-caning and ending with it. The letters j.o.u can clearly be seen in the top left segment. There are various opinions of the significance of this with some suggesting it was Picasso's turn in a game between Picasso and Braque to include words and lettering into their art, or it may also have been playful attempt at establishing a talking point in the work itself. Compared to many other Cubist works this work is much smaller, however rather than just being a small art work, the size can create intimacy, inviting the viewer to get close and personal with the work to investigate the fine details contained within. Similar to Braque’s Woman With a Guitar and other Cubist works, Still-life with Chair Caning invites close inspection of the individual details as well as the artwork as a whole. Picasso's Still-life with Chair Caning marked a distinctive shift in Modern Art with the introduction of collage and the distinctive change in treatment of the subject through abstraction.

This piece was chosen because of its subject matter. Picasso’s work always causes one to stop and ponder, whether the viewer tries to focus on one part of the picture or moves from one subject to the other, the viewer tries to see the objects in a new light. It looks at some objects in a partial way, and others are viewed from different perspectives. Since still life looks at objects from a new viewpoint already, Picasso takes it to another dimension, showing the objects in a newer dimension that is not in a traditional sense. There is such contrast in the depiction of the objects, almost as if portraying life in a blur of reality and only memory. This still life embodies what still lifes try to do, and that is making the viewer pause and look at something differently, seeing beauty in simplicity or meaning in the everyday mundane