Rooster and Knife on a Table

‘Aslaughtered rooster lies —neck slit, feet bound—on a table. Opposite are a knife and an empty bowl, ordinary kitchen utensils but also killing tools. Marie-Laure Bernadac in Picasso and Things discusses the artist’s “culinary obsessions” and cites his use of metaphors such as “the dance of household objects” (2 February 1937) and “the dangers of knives that get away” (8 November 1937) [1]. Might these ideas help explain the mixed messages of this still life as a mundane kitchen scene, a ritual killing, or perhaps a cruel allegory of the need to kill in order to survive?

The three objects, occupying the upper half of the canvas, repose as if on an altar like the instruments for a sacrifice. As Bernadac points out, “The rooster, a symbol of Christ, is often shown butchered on a table in Picasso’s paintings” [2]. The table legs and open drawer seem simultaneously to advance and recede in a Cubist manner, but they ultimately disintegrate into an agitated mass. The disjointed tabletop nearly floats from its base.

This still life borrows its subject from earlier works, especially Girl with a Rooster, 1938 (The Baltimore Museum of Art, Z.IX.109), in which a young girl holds a bound rooster by its wings. A knife on the floor at her feet predicts the bird’s fate. Jean Boggs links the rooster in a related study to “the noble tradition of Picasso’s dead birds going back at least to the painting of 1912 [MCARS, Madrid, Z.II*.339]” [3]. The present painting borrows the following elements from Picasso’s earlier Cubist works: the table and drawer in a 1918 Cubist still-life series of drawings (Z.III.181-182,184,188), and especially a painting (Z.III. 211) from Biarritz; and the dead fowl, some being plucked, in graphic works from 1918 (Z.XXIX.324-325,331-332) and 1919 such as the still life (Pigeon, Paris,1919) in which a dead pigeon hangs over the edge of a table much like the rooster here. It is interesting to note that, almost thirty years later, Picasso again associates certain forms and objects, such as this type of table and dead fowl. While his style changes dramatically, this repetition of subject matter gives Picasso’s diverse body of work its continuity and coherence. None, how-ever, displays the present painting’s simple, direct composition, which is fundamental to its power as an image of death. On the other hand, all of these works are curiously bloodless either foreshadowing death or recording its aftermath-as opposed to Picasso’s savage scenes of the 1930s (Crucifixion; The Woman with a Stylet; Death of a Female Matador and Death of a Male Matador, Cat Seizing a Bird); and the numerous bullfighting scenes of 1934, often drenched in painted blood. The still life with rooster and similar representations may be subtler manifestations of the silent aggression that so clearly marked the still-life collages made with string and nails in the spring of 1926.

In the Museum’s painting, the cross section of the rooster’s nearly severed neck is painted as a diagonally bisected quadrangle that cleverly provides a tubelike reality to what would otherwise be just a flat curve. Had the table edge not been compressed into the pictorial plane, the bird and other objects on the table would also have remained hopelessly flat. In forcing two planes to converge, Picasso has created the illusion of depth and enhanced the realistic sense of dimension essential to the impact of the painting.

Picasso frequently painted different versions of the same subject and often in pairs. The theme of the dead rooster appears in a nearly identical painting (Poultry and Knife on a Table, Paris, 21 February 1947) in which a rooster’s bound feet rise to the center of the work, much like the tied limbs of one of the human cadavers in The Charnel House, 1944-1945 (MOMA, New York), and those of animals to be slaughtered in works from 1938 (e.g., a rooster in Z.IX.109; and a goat in Z.IX.116). Recent scholarship dates both still lifes with roosters to 21 February 1947 [4]. The two works are so similar that it is difficult to tell which one was painted first or to understand why he treated the subject twice on the same day. Based on its details and degree of styliza-tion, Boggs has suggested that the Museum’s work succeeded the other one [5]. Christian Zervos, despite an initial dating error, catalogued the works in the same order.

The subject of food and the overtones of domesticity implied in these two paintings announce the theme of the abstract masterpieces both entitled Kitchen, 1948 (MOMA, New York, Z.XV.106; Musée Picasso, Paris, Z. XV. 107), glorifying the kitchen from the rue des Grands-Augustins’ [6].


[1-5] BOGGS, Jean Sutherland, Marie-Laure Bernadac y Brigitte Léal. 1992. Picasso and Things. Cat. exp. (Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1992; Filadelfia: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1992; París:Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1992). Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, pp. 23, 26, 28, 312.
[6] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Colección Museo Picasso Málaga. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 135-137.