EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Picasso’s Unseen Portrait at the Metropolitan Museum

I was going to write about how the objects most frequently depicted by the Cubists in their café still-lifes – pipe, bottle, glass and guitar – were used not primarily as items characteristic of café-life as Rosalind Krauss and others have argued. At least that is not their meaning. They do make sense in scenes of café society (as in the one above) but they were used, primarily, because they were part of a long tradition as symbols of painting. Smoking and drinking (pipe, bottle and glass) were depicted by Rembrandt and others as images of mental intoxication and, therefore, stimulation of the imagination. Bottles and glasses have long been common in artists’ studios to hold paints and other liquids, such as oils and paint thinners. Playing music, as I argue under the theme Music as Art, has also been used as a metaphor for the act of painting too, ever since the early Renaissance. And small tables, of course, are commonly used in studios as work-tables or even palettes. Significantly in this regard Picasso, it has been reported, always used a table-top as his palette. 

No, what caught my attention as I began to write this entry on the Still-Life with Bottle of Rum (above) was Picasso’s own face staring out of the canvas, disguised as God knows what, perhaps a glass and the necks of some bottles. The most telling features are the diagonal of his well-known hair-style crossing his forehead, the large and small eye (to indicate the two forms of visual perception), his broad mouth and large chin. The painting has been hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, New York for years but no-one, it seems, has ever brought this to the curators’ attention.

For 55 examples by other artists from the Renaissance to the present day, see the entries under the theme Veiled Faces.