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337 PABLO PICASSO (after)
Bouteille de Rhum
.
Color collotype and stencil, circa 1965. 600x495 mm; 23
5
/
8
x19
1
/
2
inches, full margins.
Signed and numbered 40/250 in pencil, lower margin, and numbered 40/250 in ink, verso.
Published by Guy Spitzer, Paris, with the blind stamp lower left recto and the ink stamp
verso. A superb impression of this large Cubist print, with strong colors.
Based on the same-titled oil painting now inThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, NewYork
(Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998, accession number 1999.363.63). This
painting, created during the summer of 1911 in the French Pyrenees town of Céret, dates
from Picasso’s most abstract phase of Cubism, known as “high”Analytic Cubism. Indeed,
it is difficult to decipher the bottle of rum alluded to in the title.This is one of the first
works in which Picasso included letter forms. Visible on the left hand side of the
composition, the letters LETR might refer to the popular bullfighting magazine
LeTorero
,
which Picasso as an avid fan surely would have known, or perhaps they are simply a pun
on the French “lettre” or “word.”
[10,000/15,000]