Lot Essay
On March 21, 1947, in his studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, Picasso painted the present picture and a related still-life. Both images show a rooster with its throat cut and a bowl or dish with a bloody knife resting on top of a small work table. The present picture is the more poignant of the two. The trussed legs sticking straight up in the air, the exposed wound in the neck, and the more clearly isolated features of the head make the bird seem especially pitiable. In the present version, moreover, the complete absence of incidental detail and the sharp geometry of the design serve to highlight the animal's suffering. Jean Sutherland Boggs has suggested that the present picture was painted first because "the other is flatter and more stylized...[it shows] the complete collapse of the bird...[and] the drawer is even more invitingly open" (J. S. Boggs, exh. cat., op. cit., Cleveland, 1992, p. 312). While we may debate the order of execution, what cannot be questioned is that the present work is the more successful.
According to Brassa, Picasso's close friend, the artist "always wanted a [pet] cock...somewhere near him" (Brassa, Picasso and Company, New York, 1966, p. 196). His oeuvre abounds with images of roosters, sometimes as personifications of masculinity, but often as sacrificial victims, trussed and slaughtered. One early example of this is Chien et coq (fig. 1) from 1921; some later versions are La chatte et le coq (Zervos, vol. 16, no. 55; Muse national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Le coq le pattes attaches (fig. 2) and Le coq gorg (fig. 3). A related canvas is the 1938 Femme au coq (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 109; Museum of Art, Baltimore).
Still-lifes of this kind are deeply rooted in the tradition of European painting. One master who certainly influenced Picasso in this genre was Goya (fig. 4). In 1946, when given the chance to exhibit some of his works next to paintings at the Louvre, one of the masters Picasso chose for comparison was Goya. We do not know which pictures by Goya he chose, but one might have been Goya's Natura laza meurta con pavo muerto, an important source for Picasso's wartime still-lifes. At the end of the Louvre test, he is reported to have exulted, "You see it's the same thing! It's the same thing!" (quoted in R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981 [3rd edition], p. 395).
In old master painting, still-lifes were often imbued with allegorical meaning. Picasso's still-lifes of dead birds have been interpreted as images intended to give significance to suffering and death by interpreting them in light of sacrificial rites. The first to read the present picture in this way was Willard Misfeldt, who wrote:
In 1947 the blue-gray cock, its throat now slit, lies dead on an ordinary kitchen table, whose isolation and severity make it appear almost as an altar. The knife, the instrument of sacrifice, reposes on a blood-filled bowl behind the victim. It is as if the cock has at last fulfilled its sacrificial role as assigned him in 1938, purging the war years' gloom and horror. (W. Misfeldt, op. cit., p. 182)
Professor Lydia Gasman, moreover, has interpreted a broad range of Picasso's imagery in sacrificial terms. She has stated that Picasso had an "obsessive concern with ritual sacrifice and its meanings" and that:
Picasso's conception of sacrifice as primitive ritual...is the key to understanding some of his greatest works. His bullfights, crucifixions and scenes of cruelty, killing, dying and death, even his still-lifes involving a momento mori...cannot be understood without considering that conception. (L. Gasman, Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso: 1925-1938, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1981, p. 571)
Gasman has also observed that two close friends of Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire and Michel Leiris, were keenly interested in the ideas of the anthropologist Robertson Smith, who understood sacrifice as a communal meal between the totemic group or clan and their god. Gasman has suggested that Picasso too may have been interested in Smith's ideas.
Marie-Laure Bernadac is another scholar fascinated by the sacrificial symbolism in Picasso's oeuvre, but she has seen it primarily in a Christian rather than a Dionysian light:
In Picasso's poetry, there are many metaphors that associate food with the Christian attributes: "The bread mended with red thread and nailed with thorns hangs it from the mainmast of the 'boat'" (27 January 1936)..."the wheat will twist its chimera around the mask of the bark without a sail alone in the middle of the tablecloth draped on the table...at the dance of the rooster's crest" (5 December 1935). The rooster, a symbol of Christ, is often shown butchered on a table in Picasso's paintings... The food cycle, the cycle of life and death, ends--or begins--with this final religious metaphor: "from the sacrum to the sacred." (M. Bernadac, exh. cat., op. cit., Cleveland, 1992, p. 28)
Jean Sutherland Boggs, too, has discussed Picasso's pictures of dead birds in symbolic terms. She has compared the 1912 Les oiseaux morts to a medieval altarpiece, and she has called one 1919 still-life an image "of a ritual of death and expectation and hope" (J. S. Boggs, exh. cat., ibid., Cleveland, 1992, pp. 108 and 178).
A reading of Picasso's poetry supports such interpretations. Seventeen months after he painted Volaille et couteau, Picasso wrote a play, Les quatre petites filles, which deals primarily with ritual sacrifice. In this surrealist allegory, four little girls kill a goat and a bird in highly bloody and Dionysian-like rites. Some of the imagery in the play may be relevant to the present painting. One of the girls describes how:
...the sham violet cuts the throat of the window dragged on the tiles of the kitchen floor by its hair, the table wetting its feet in the blood. (Translated by R. Penrose, The Four Little Girls, London, 1970, pp. 61-62)
When the bird dies, one of the girls says, "The little creature is dead, ora pro nobis" (Translated by ibid., p. 57). The words "ora pro nobis" are Latin for "pray for us" and come from the Catholic rite. This adds further credibility to the sacral and mythic interpretation of Picasso's still-lifes.
The composition of the present picture stresses order and balance. Here, as in many of his still-lifes, Picasso has placed the organic object in the left half of the picture and the inorganic in the right half. The picture has a stark and fundamental geometry; its design is made up almost entirely of triangles which visually echo one another: for example, the blade of the knife and the shadow in the open drawer. The cock is symmetrical: the tail and neck fall to nearly the same point; the wound in the throat and the "pope's nose" form two diamond-shaped units of the same size, and the wings and feet are equidistant from the horizontal mid-line of the canvas.
In the late 1940s, Picasso from time to time sold pictures to the American dealer Sam Kootz in order to extract higher prices from Kahnweiler. The artist gave the present painting to Kootz in exchange for a white convertible Oldsmobile. Of this event, Franoise Gilot has written:
Occasionally Pablo even gave Kootz pictures directly, in return for some favor. One year he had Kootz ship to him, just before coming to France in June, a white Oldsmobile convertible, in exchange for a painting. That way he was able to tell Kahnweiler, "Oh, I gave him a picture because he sent me an automobile." I remember the Oldsmobile was exchanged for a large still life with a table on which lay a cock whose throat had been cut, the knife that did him in, and a dish containing the blood. (F. Gilot and C. Lake, op. cit., p. 182)
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Chien et coq, 1921
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Gift of Stephen C. Clark, B.A. 1903
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Le coq les pattes attaches, 1962 Private Collection
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le coq gorg, 1953
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Francesco de Goya y Lucientas, Natura laza meurta con pavo muerto, 1808-12
Museo del Prado, Madrid
According to Brassa, Picasso's close friend, the artist "always wanted a [pet] cock...somewhere near him" (Brassa, Picasso and Company, New York, 1966, p. 196). His oeuvre abounds with images of roosters, sometimes as personifications of masculinity, but often as sacrificial victims, trussed and slaughtered. One early example of this is Chien et coq (fig. 1) from 1921; some later versions are La chatte et le coq (Zervos, vol. 16, no. 55; Muse national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), Le coq le pattes attaches (fig. 2) and Le coq gorg (fig. 3). A related canvas is the 1938 Femme au coq (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 109; Museum of Art, Baltimore).
Still-lifes of this kind are deeply rooted in the tradition of European painting. One master who certainly influenced Picasso in this genre was Goya (fig. 4). In 1946, when given the chance to exhibit some of his works next to paintings at the Louvre, one of the masters Picasso chose for comparison was Goya. We do not know which pictures by Goya he chose, but one might have been Goya's Natura laza meurta con pavo muerto, an important source for Picasso's wartime still-lifes. At the end of the Louvre test, he is reported to have exulted, "You see it's the same thing! It's the same thing!" (quoted in R. Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, Berkeley, 1981 [3rd edition], p. 395).
In old master painting, still-lifes were often imbued with allegorical meaning. Picasso's still-lifes of dead birds have been interpreted as images intended to give significance to suffering and death by interpreting them in light of sacrificial rites. The first to read the present picture in this way was Willard Misfeldt, who wrote:
In 1947 the blue-gray cock, its throat now slit, lies dead on an ordinary kitchen table, whose isolation and severity make it appear almost as an altar. The knife, the instrument of sacrifice, reposes on a blood-filled bowl behind the victim. It is as if the cock has at last fulfilled its sacrificial role as assigned him in 1938, purging the war years' gloom and horror. (W. Misfeldt, op. cit., p. 182)
Professor Lydia Gasman, moreover, has interpreted a broad range of Picasso's imagery in sacrificial terms. She has stated that Picasso had an "obsessive concern with ritual sacrifice and its meanings" and that:
Picasso's conception of sacrifice as primitive ritual...is the key to understanding some of his greatest works. His bullfights, crucifixions and scenes of cruelty, killing, dying and death, even his still-lifes involving a momento mori...cannot be understood without considering that conception. (L. Gasman, Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso: 1925-1938, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1981, p. 571)
Gasman has also observed that two close friends of Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire and Michel Leiris, were keenly interested in the ideas of the anthropologist Robertson Smith, who understood sacrifice as a communal meal between the totemic group or clan and their god. Gasman has suggested that Picasso too may have been interested in Smith's ideas.
Marie-Laure Bernadac is another scholar fascinated by the sacrificial symbolism in Picasso's oeuvre, but she has seen it primarily in a Christian rather than a Dionysian light:
In Picasso's poetry, there are many metaphors that associate food with the Christian attributes: "The bread mended with red thread and nailed with thorns hangs it from the mainmast of the 'boat'" (27 January 1936)..."the wheat will twist its chimera around the mask of the bark without a sail alone in the middle of the tablecloth draped on the table...at the dance of the rooster's crest" (5 December 1935). The rooster, a symbol of Christ, is often shown butchered on a table in Picasso's paintings... The food cycle, the cycle of life and death, ends--or begins--with this final religious metaphor: "from the sacrum to the sacred." (M. Bernadac, exh. cat., op. cit., Cleveland, 1992, p. 28)
Jean Sutherland Boggs, too, has discussed Picasso's pictures of dead birds in symbolic terms. She has compared the 1912 Les oiseaux morts to a medieval altarpiece, and she has called one 1919 still-life an image "of a ritual of death and expectation and hope" (J. S. Boggs, exh. cat., ibid., Cleveland, 1992, pp. 108 and 178).
A reading of Picasso's poetry supports such interpretations. Seventeen months after he painted Volaille et couteau, Picasso wrote a play, Les quatre petites filles, which deals primarily with ritual sacrifice. In this surrealist allegory, four little girls kill a goat and a bird in highly bloody and Dionysian-like rites. Some of the imagery in the play may be relevant to the present painting. One of the girls describes how:
...the sham violet cuts the throat of the window dragged on the tiles of the kitchen floor by its hair, the table wetting its feet in the blood. (Translated by R. Penrose, The Four Little Girls, London, 1970, pp. 61-62)
When the bird dies, one of the girls says, "The little creature is dead, ora pro nobis" (Translated by ibid., p. 57). The words "ora pro nobis" are Latin for "pray for us" and come from the Catholic rite. This adds further credibility to the sacral and mythic interpretation of Picasso's still-lifes.
The composition of the present picture stresses order and balance. Here, as in many of his still-lifes, Picasso has placed the organic object in the left half of the picture and the inorganic in the right half. The picture has a stark and fundamental geometry; its design is made up almost entirely of triangles which visually echo one another: for example, the blade of the knife and the shadow in the open drawer. The cock is symmetrical: the tail and neck fall to nearly the same point; the wound in the throat and the "pope's nose" form two diamond-shaped units of the same size, and the wings and feet are equidistant from the horizontal mid-line of the canvas.
In the late 1940s, Picasso from time to time sold pictures to the American dealer Sam Kootz in order to extract higher prices from Kahnweiler. The artist gave the present painting to Kootz in exchange for a white convertible Oldsmobile. Of this event, Franoise Gilot has written:
Occasionally Pablo even gave Kootz pictures directly, in return for some favor. One year he had Kootz ship to him, just before coming to France in June, a white Oldsmobile convertible, in exchange for a painting. That way he was able to tell Kahnweiler, "Oh, I gave him a picture because he sent me an automobile." I remember the Oldsmobile was exchanged for a large still life with a table on which lay a cock whose throat had been cut, the knife that did him in, and a dish containing the blood. (F. Gilot and C. Lake, op. cit., p. 182)
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Chien et coq, 1921
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Gift of Stephen C. Clark, B.A. 1903
(fig. 2) Pablo Picasso, Le coq les pattes attaches, 1962 Private Collection
(fig. 3) Pablo Picasso, Le coq gorg, 1953
Private Collection
(fig. 4) Francesco de Goya y Lucientas, Natura laza meurta con pavo muerto, 1808-12
Museo del Prado, Madrid