Wuzon da Block?

Time was you could still land a nice Picasso canvas for under a mil. Today, with few exceptions, you’re looking at a cool 2 or 3 mil, or then some, for a starter Picasso.  Yet, more likely than not, what you get for your money is uninspiring.  So along comes this offering at Christie’s London.  I must say that the first time I leafed through their online catalogue, the painting Nature Morte à la Cruche (1937; above) didn’t catch my eye.   That first time around, I had judged it merely as one would a still life and, as such, I readily dismissed it.  After all, Picasso certainly painted many more beautiful and more clever still lifes.  But when my printed catalogue arrived, I gave it a closer look.  Now I saw a lovely, colorful painting in which Picasso’s lover Marie-Thérèse is depicted not once but twice, as the bowl of fruit in the foreground and also in the drawing-within-a-painting hanging on the wall.  The jug struck me as rather masculine, convincing me that it represents a male suitor, Picasso to the fruit bowl’s Marie-T.  Of course the master’s ego had to endure an ample belly, a small sacrifice in the service of art.  As if resigned to this fate, he highlighted his contour in white.   Well, there are other Picasso portraits of women à  la pitchers, two of them quite renowned, but offhand I can’t think of another artwork in which the pitcher is the doppelgänger for the Maitre himself.  (By the way, the Christie’s catalogue caption is well-crafted and informative and totally worth reading.  And its author agrees with me, at least on most points.)