Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong presents a groundbreaking and unique show of thirteen paintings by Pablo Picasso. Spanning seven decades of the artist’s extraordinary career, the works offer a comprehensive journey through Picasso’s oeuvre.
Executed in 1919, Vase, Pipe, Paquet de Tabac is an extremely important work immediately following Picasso’s ‘Cubist’ period. This was a time of intense experimentation and artistic innovation for the painter, a fact which is apparent in the present work. At once faithful in its portrayal of the objects (the vase, the pipe, and the packet of tobacco) and revolutionary in the way they collide, merge and sit on different pictorial planes; this work encapsulates the main concerns which stayed with Picasso throughout his artistic journey: the primacy of colour, the love of portraiture (intended in the broader sense of the term) and the importance of abstraction within figuration.