Smaller than you think
The first surprise, if you ever meet it in person, is the size. Reproductions make it loom like a monument; the actual thing is about a foot by a foot and a half — no bigger than a placemat, which, given the subject, feels about right. One of the most consequential objects in modern art is small enough to hold on your lap. The second surprise is that Picasso never sold it. He kept the breakthrough in his personal collection for the rest of his life — sixty-one years — the way you might keep the first banknote a business ever took.
From a glued scrap to half a century
What he had started ran straight through the century — and it began by turning Cubism inside out. Gluing a flat, ready-made shape onto the canvas taught Picasso and Braque a new lesson: a picture could be built up from flat pieces, instead of a real object being broken down into facets. That reversal became Synthetic Cubism — the brighter, assembled second phase of the movement, the mirror image of the gray, shattered-gem look of the Analytic years. Then the door swung wide. The German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), a few years later, built whole pictures — and eventually entire rooms — out of tram tickets, bus stubs and gutter trash, a one-man movement he named Merz (a nonsense syllable he had snipped from an advert for a bank, Kommerz).
The Berlin Dadaists — a deliberately absurd, anti-art movement born of disgust at the First World War — turned scissors and magazines into political weapons. Hannah Höch, too often dropped from this story, was one of the sharpest of them, slicing the illustrated press into biting photomontage (pictures collaged from cut-up photographs). Decades on, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, working in 1950s New York, fixed quilts, tyres, even a stuffed goat to his work and called the results Combines. And Pop Art — the movement that hung soup cans and comic strips on gallery walls — simply moved in for good: the supermarket Picasso had let through the door in 1912 took over the house. Every time an artist since has glued, taped, screwed or bolted a real object to a picture, they have been speaking the grammar this little oval invented.
A salt-tax mansion in Paris
When Picasso died in 1973 he left no will and an enormous hoard of work he had refused to part with. Under a French law that lets heirs settle inheritance tax in artworks rather than cash — the dation — much of that hoard passed to the nation, and it became the Musée Picasso, opened in 1985 in the Hôtel Salé, a grand 17th-century mansion built, fittingly, on a fortune made from the salt tax. The little oval hangs there now, behind glass, still wearing its piece of rope.
Visitors come expecting a monument and find a place setting the size of a napkin. Which may be the joke Picasso would have liked best: the picture that ended painting-as-illusion turns out to be a small, perfect illusion of a table — one you could almost pull up a chair to, if the chair weren’t printed on a piece of cloth.