Picasso, Pablo Still Life with Death's Head Paris, autumn 1907 Oil on canvas 115 x 88 cm Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

From "Picasso and Things," Cleveland Museum of Art:

"The dating of the work was revised from Zervos's date of the fall of 1907 to the dating, which Daix accepted, of the summer or fall of 1908, based on the hypothesis of Theodore Reff that the work is a memento mori for the Dusseldorf painter, G. Wieghels, who hanged himself in the Bateau-Lavoir, where both he and Picasso painted and lived, on 1 June 1908. More recently, it has been proposed by the late Anatoli Podoksik that it was more probably the death of Alfred Jarry on 1 November 1907 that inspired the work, which he argues is strongly linked stylistically with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". His arguments for its dating are more convincing, however, than any special relationships with the work or life of Alfred Jarry, which are as difficult to establish as are the connections of the painting a year later with the obscure Wieghels. To make it even more improbable, John Richardson in his recent biography of Picasso tells us that Picasso and Jarry never met. The painting's exotic pinks and vermilions could suggest the work of Gauguin, already dead in 1903, whom Jarry did know. Still Life with Death's Head may, however, have been a more general memento mori for artistic genius, in particular, for Paul Cezanne, who had died in 1906 and for whom there were two important memorial exhibitions in Paris in 1907: his watercolors at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in the summer and his paintings at the Salon d'Automne in October. The pipe, the books, the squared palette from which the curve of a C is cut, the skull itself could have been in recognition of the work of Cezanne, for whom Picasso's respect would only grow. Leo Steinberg was to write of the skull in this painting, which he nevertheless acknowledged to be "powerful," that, "it is a conventional vanitas symbol, and a Cezannesque prop."

"...There are essentially two zones in the painting. In the background, from the fingerhole of a dull brown palette, spring five brushes, as if they were twigs and almost part of the decorative, clearly painted autumnal landscape in greens and browns behind. Propped against that landscape is a simple but glaringly gilt mirror, which reflects one of Picasso's voluptuous nudes of 1907, a postscript to the Demoiselles, and which in its brownish flesh against blue is in itself calm and resolved. Above the mirror the landscape becomes green and even junglelike. Between the palette and the mirror there is a passage of blue that directs us toward the reflected painting of the nude. In the foreground--the second zone--the skull is placed beside a pile of books against which a pipe rises as if it were a pen on an inkstand. To the right the dark brown bucket of a tobacco humidor contains a golden bowl, as if it were the kernel of a nut, a seed, a womb. The table is covered with a cloth of an aggressive orange red to lilac, which is nevertheless not as menacing as the curtain in the Demoiselles. The reds change. The skull, the only object explored sculpturally and with anticipations of Cubism, is linked to the mirror's frame in its goldness and set off by a fringe of very dark green paint. It is so natural to associate hair with a head that we overlook its absurdity.

"Still Life with Death's Head symbolizes a painter's world with intimations of the solace to be discovered in tobacco and books, and the sensuality to be found in nature and a seductive nude. It is restless and anxious, only barely resolved as the forces of the left half are balanced by those of the right, essentially the skull against the mauve triangle descending from the navel of the nude to the skull and humidor. We cannot doubt the passion of Picasso's convictions, if only because of the immediacy and savagery of the execution. Although Still Life with Death's Head is not varnished, the oil paint itself, which he applied thinly so that flecks of the canvas are visible, has a certain inherent gloss that contrasts with the white canvas where he left certain areas of it exposed as he did with the ends of the books. In spite of the directness of his handling of paint, Picasso wanted to pay his respect to the tragedy of death through the protective indirection of symbols. The fingers of the artist presumably dead have been replaced by five brushes in the fingerhole of his palette. The nude is not only painted but reflected in a mirror. Any sanctity the skull might have possessed is tweaked by the pipe leaning against it. The skull, which does not lack the drama of bones that have once lived, is finally contrasted with the nude which, although painted, although reflected, still provocatively lives."