Still Life with Skull and Three Sea Urchins

‘When the second world war broke out, Picasso resumed painting and sculpting representations of the human skull. His output reached its height during the last two years of the German occupation of Paris. The paintings often included a medley of other objects, such as candles, open books, vegetables, fish, and pitchers. The skull motif appeared, as well, in Picasso’s lithographs (Composition with a Skull). He also modeled frighteningly realistic skulls and had them cast in bronze in 1943 in a famous wartime series.

Both human and animal skulls had been present in Picasso’s earlier work, according to Alfred Barr, Jr., but it was during the war that the skull became a “frequent motif in his still-life compositions” [1]. When his friend the artist Julio González died in 1942, Picasso expressed his grief by painting a symbol of death, Still Life with a Steer’s Skull (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), identified by Pierre Daix as the skull of a bull [2]. After the war, he explored more fully the theme of vanitas—a subject that belongs to a centuries-old tradition and reveals Picasso’s particular affinity for Dutch baroque painting.

While Picasso was working on the present painting in January 1947, his companion, Françoise Gilot, was five months pregnant with their son, Claude. The war was over, and Picasso’s third child was soon to be born; yet, the canvas is filled with fore-boding, relieved only in part by its vivid blue and yellow colors. Perhaps the painting signifies the natural confrontation with death that is implied in the arrival of new life.

In the present painting, Picasso seems to have repeated the earlier composition of Still Life with a Bull’s Head from a 1938 series depicting a table with candle, palette, open book, and bull or minotaur’s head. Both paintings remained with the artist and were listed in the estate inventory. The similarities in the geometric structure and the organization of the paintings are important: a prominent, sharply angled form appears at the center of both works (situated, in the earlier painting, to the immediate left of the bull’s head); the line of the table is repeated as the striped support for the skull and three sea urchins; and the vertical band appears at the left edge of both paintings. The pentagonal shape within the geometric block underneath the bull’s head corresponds to the container for the sea urchins in the present paint-ing and is in the same location on the canvas. The bull’s head and the symbol of the earthly arts in the former painting can be equated with the human skull and the creatures from the sea.

When Jaime Sabartés questioned him about the significance of the sea urchins, Picasso said, “The eyes collect objects in passing…Purely and simply…in the same manner that I gather what I find in front of me.” No more important than any other object, the sea urchins contributed to the element of surprise and fortunate accidents that Picasso insisted upon in his art [3]. Two of the sea urchins are seen from above and one from the side. The middle one shows the five-pointed star normally hidden within its shell. Despite their flat rendering, the thorny sea creatures seem to bob as playfully as Picasso’s athletic beachgoers from Dinard. This sense of contained animation contrasts with the solemnity of the static human skull. Dancing before its hollow eyes, the sea urchins may be a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life. Some art historians have suggested a Christian interpretation for the skull and three sea urchins, i.e., that they represent either Christ’s Crucifixion and his thorny crown or humanity and the holy Trinity.

Sea urchins began to appear in Picasso’s work in October 1946, following his postwar focus on the vanitas theme; many of these works are in the Musée Picasso in Antibes [4] The present example is one of three paint-ings of skulls and urchins dating from January and February of 1947 (Z.XV.26-27,31). A little more than two years after its execution, this painting was exhibited in Paris at La Maison de la Pensée Française, where it was one of sixty-four works. It has been on public view only once more, in the 1994-1995 exhibition Picasso. Primera mirada’ [5].


[1] BARR, Alfred H., Jr. [1946| 1974. Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. 3’d ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 238.
[2] DAIX, Pierre. 1995. Dictionnaire Picasso. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, p. 623.
[3] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen. 1994. Picasso. Primera mirada. Exh. cat. (Malaga: Palacio Episcopal, 1994-1995; Seville: Pabellon Mudejar, 1995; Nîmes: Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain, 1995) Seville: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, p. 317.
[4] SABARTÉS, Jaime and Paul Éluard. 1948. Picasso à Antibes. Paris: Éditions René Drouin, p. 33.
[5] GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Collection Museo Picasso Málaga. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, pp. 129-131.