David Hockney, Mt. Fuji and Flowers, 1972, acrylic on canvas. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
have been due to the Fernande creeping into his life, step by step, to opium, or to the gradual lifting of the oppressive weight of the Blue Period. A new poetic sensibility was beginning to favour Picasso’s paintings at this time. This is exemplifed by the presence of the fowers in Vase de feurs, with their vivid beauty, their dramatic colours but their clear relationship to the memento mori message contained in so many traditional foral still life compositions by earlier artists. There is a deliberate fragility to some of the petals in Vase de fleurs that accentuates this notion of the vulnerability associated with life, a concept that was all too close to Picasso’s life afer the death of Casagemas. But the light and colours in Vase de feurs speak of this more positive aspect to that delicate lyricism. In this sense, the picture can be seen to pre-figure Rose Period masterpieces such as Picasso’s celebrated Garçon à la pipe, painted the following year. In that work, a slender youth is shown holding a pipe—perhaps tapping into the iconography of his dalliance with narcotics. In the background are flowers, and so too in the form of a wreath on the boy’s head.
As is the case with Garçon à la pipe, the almost narcotic atmosphere of Picasso’s fower paintings can be seen to recall the mystery, the dream-like quality, of the pictures of Odilon Redon. The end of the Blue Period and the beginning of the Rose are suffused with a similar oneiric poetry to that of Redon’s works, which were often marked by an almost subaqueous ambience. Perhaps it was in part this that drew Sainsère to Vase de fleurs—he was one of Redon’s great patrons in the early part of the 20th century, and indeed the artist drew his portrait, which is in the Ian Woodner Family Collection. Picasso begrudgingly admitted that Redon was an interesting painter, though he disputed Matisse’s claim that he was greater than Manet. There was another artist whose infuence Picasso was more willing to admit who had been creating fower paintings flled with a lyrical ambience: Paul Gauguin. In his biography of Picasso, the late John Richardson related that the artist had his own richly-annotated copy of Gauguin’s Noa Noa. During the early 1900s, Picasso would create a number of works that