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Artwork · 1911 · Still life

Pigeon with Peas (La Pigeon aux Petits Pois)

Pablo Picasso
1911 · Oil on Canvas
Stolen
★ 6.3 editorial score

A pigeon and a scatter of peas are dissolved into a shimmering scaffold of faceted ochre, grey, and green planes, the bird and table barely emerging from the crystalline Cubist structure. Picasso painted this at the height of his Analytic Cubist partnership with Braque. Now infamously among the missing, it was stolen in the 2010 theft from the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris and has never been recovered - present in this collection only as a reproduction. The Pigeon with Peas remains a vivid example of Cubism's radical fracturing of the visible world into overlapping facets.

Movement
Cubism
Subject
Birds
Place
Stolen

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Quote · 1977

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain.”

Colleen McCullough