Picasso, the cubist work "Verre et pipe" at auction in Paris

Painted in 1917 "Verre et pipe" dates back to a precise moment in the career of Pablo Picasso, during which experimentation effortlessly alternated between the two prevalent but paradoxical artistic styles the war avant-gardes of Paris, Cubism and Neo-Classicism dominated. This was a year where Picasso was exposed to new cultures and artistic influences on his travels to Rome and Barcelona. It was the year he also met his future wife, the Russian ballerina, Olga Khokhlova and the first time he worked with the famous Sergei Diaghilev and with the Ballets Russes, creating sets and costumes for a ballet, Parade. Between portraits of harlequins, classically inspired portraits of his love for Olga and pointillist-inspired compositions. Picasso also painted a small number of portraits and still lifes in the Cubist style. It is to this small group that Verre et pipe belongs, a rare example of Picasso's Cubist practice.

With its flattened planes of color that nestle, the Verre et pipe by Pablo Picasso encapsulates the artist's newly developed Synthetic Cubism. While Analytical Cubism was inaugurated around 1910 by Picasso with his friend and fellow cubist pioneer Georges Braque with broken and fragmented forms, Synthetic Cubism reintroduced a sense of pictorial stability once again. Unmodeled planes of often brilliant color with facets unfolding in a harmonious rhythm across the surface of the canvas were used to construct the compositions. Objects no longer shattered and dissolved into a web of intersecting lines and volumeless shadows. Verre et pipe exemplifies this method of synthetic construction. Arranged on a table like actors on a stage, the main protagonists of the still life are the glass and the pipe and they are only recognizable thanks to the stylized and significant shapes that allow us to identify them.

During the war years, Synthetic Cubism became the embodiment of the prevailing cultural sentiment known as "the return to order". As the trauma of World War I reverberated through France and Europe, artists and writers alike sought a new stability, harmony and collectivism in art. Synthetic Cubism, practiced not only by its inventor, Picasso, but also by a legion of his followers, including including Metzinger, Gleizes, Gris and Severini it embodied the desire for a new harmonized and unified artistic language. This Cubist modality would become, at the end of the war, known as "crystalline" or "classical" Cubism, a reflection of its clean, purified aesthetics, lucid structure, accentuated and sober distillation of life. Determined to maintain his position as leader of the avant-garde, at the outbreak of war, Picasso underwent a startling about-face in his art, moving away from the Cubist pictorial language he had created to embrace what appeared to be a retrograde, naturalistic idiom of the past.