Composition with a Skull

‘The lines of this 1946 still life were first executed on paper with a lithographic crayon and then transferred to Stone and printed. The advantage of the transfer process is that the image is not reversed; the composition of the final lithograph has the same orientation as the initial drawing in lithographic crayon.

Book, pitcher, and skull – the symbolic references to knowledge, life, and morality – have been carefully assembled in this paper still life and are represented in the tradition of the momento mori. Picasso frequently relied on such interpretations in treating the theme of death, and skulls are treated in early works such as the realistic still-life drawings from 1908 (MP 548, Z. XXVI.1192; MP 549, Z.XXVI.1192) from a painting, Still Life with Skull, 1908 (The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). However, it was during the Second World War that he explored the subject of death in various artistic mediums. In these years, the human skull invaded his drawings and paintings. He even created frighteningly realistic, almost morbid, versions in bronze (Spies 212-216, 219): one example from 1943 is discussed in this catalogue (Head of a Dead Man). The pitcher and skull are depicted in Works as early as August 1943 (Z.XIII.88-91), re-emerge in a series of paintings in 1945 (e.g., Z.XIV.87), and, like the present example, appear again after the work.

The lithograph reflects the traditional presentation of similar objects in the seventeenth-century paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán; yet, the angular lines and geometrics forms of this work are architectural, evoking the extreme perspective in Giorgio de Chirico´s twentieth-century compositions that Picasso admired and collected. Executed the day after his lithograph, Picasso´s sketches of this same scene show the complex geometric underpinnings of the still life and the artist´s attempts to alter the composition and the perspective (Z.XIV.152-158).The classical theme of this allegorical still life is treated with a modern approach, The book and the spherical objects are set against the simple background both as separate, isolated elements and as related whole. The lines unite the composition, meanwhile allowing the viewer to look through the object as if the lithograph were an x-ray in which only structures were revealed.

The lithograph was pulled in February of 1946 and is one of six artist’s proofs in existence. Another impression of the lithograph (Composition au crâne) is in the Musée Picasso in Paris. The composition of the graphic work relates closely to the Musée Picasso´s Still Life, dated 1 March 1946 (Vanité), a painting from the estate of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso´s last wife’.

Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Collection Museo Picasso Málaga. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 477-479.