Man with a Pipe

This is an image and artical from the Kimbell Art Museum website (linked below) that offers information about Picasso's "Man with a Pipe" - a cubist work that is more or less reminiscent of the boxes in Mr. B.'s classroom.

© 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Man with a Pipe 1911
Oil on canvas
35-3/4 x 27-7/8 in. (oval) (90.7 x 71.0 cm)
Acquired in 1966

by the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth

On viewIn early July 1911, Picasso left Paris for Céret, a small town near Arles, in southwestern France. Braque joined him there in August and the two painted their ultimate Analytical Cubist works in intense dialogue. Composed in something like jigsaw puzzle fashion from interlocking and overlapping fragmentary facets, some roughly legible as an eye, mustache, or hand, Man with a Pipe exemplifies two especially important, albeit idiosyncratic, tendencies common to the 1910-12 works by Braque and Picasso. First, the painting belongs to a group of oval-shaped canvases initiated in the spring of 1910 by Braque, perhaps to stress the sculptural sense of Cubism, perhaps to emulate the somber oval portraits painted by Rembrandt and his contemporaries. Second, around that same time, both painters also began to paint with particularly dark palettes. Man with a Pipe presumably represents the interior of a dimly-lit, smoke-filled bar (hence the letters "est" detached from the word "restaurant" and the letters "AL" printed on the corner of a white "journal," meaning "newspaper" in French). Nevertheless, the nocturnal mood seems intended as a challenge to seeing in conventional terms, as if in these very dark paintings Braque and Picasso invited viewers to strain their eyes in a difficult new way of looking. Of course, a similar melancholy mood was a hallmark of Picasso's 1901-4 Blue Period paintings, which often treated the subject of figures in a cabaret setting.
Picasso's Analytical Cubist compositions of 1910-12 were a touchstone for many abstract painters, among them Piet Mondrian, whose beautiful Composition No. 7 (Facade), is in the collection of the Kimbell. With this in mind, it is worth noting that Mondrian helped organize an exhibition of modern art in October 1912 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, including Man with a Pipe and eleven other Picasso paintings.
Provenance HistoryPrivate collection, Paris;(M. Knoedler & Co., New York);purchased by Kimbell Art Foundation, Fort Worth, 1966.