The morning he stopped painting

One day in the spring of 1912 — by most accounts that May — Picasso took a small oval canvas and did something that had almost no precedent in serious Western painting. Instead of reaching for a brush, he reached for a strip of oilcloth: cheap, waterproof, factory-printed fabric, the kind people bought by the meter to cover a kitchen table. This particular oilcloth was printed with a pattern of chair caning — the woven rattan mesh of a bistro chair seat. He cut a piece off and glued it straight onto the canvas.

Sit with how strange that is. The caning is not real cane. But it is also not painted cane. It is a machine-made, mass-produced picture of cane — a factory fake — and Picasso has dropped it, untouched, into the middle of a serious work of art. For five centuries a painter’s job had been to imitate the world by hand, with skill. Picasso just bought the imitation at a shop and pasted it down. The most laborious trick in painting, the convincing surface, was suddenly something you could pick up ready-made.

Then he did it again. Around the oval edge of the canvas he glued a length of ordinary rope. It works as a frame — but a frame is supposed to sit around a picture, separating the art from the wall; this one is part of the object. And it reads two ways at once. It is the gilt rim of a picture frame, yes — but it is also, unmistakably, the carved wooden edge of a small round café table seen from above. Picasso refuses to tell you which. Is this a picture of a table, or a thing that is a table? Both. Neither.

The oval shape is not a whim. Picasso and Braque had been painting on oval canvases through 1911 and 1912 for a practical reason: the rounded format quietly does away with the four corners, the dead zones where a Cubist composition tends to fall apart, and it echoes the little round pedestal café table — the French call it a guéridon — that so many of these still lifes are built on. Here the oval and the rope-as-table-edge work together: the whole picture is a tabletop, tipped up to face you.

And the painted parts? They are still pure Analytic Cubism — the same brown-gray facets, the same splintered light he and Braque had been refining for three years. That is what makes this little canvas a hinge. One half of it is the last gasp of the old faceting; the other half is a glued-on scrap of the real world. The future and the past of Cubism, sharing a single oval about a foot across.