Glass of Absinthe

Glass of Absinthe, which shows a small glass of liquid on a café table, was painted in 1911 during Picasso's Cubist period. In the painting, flat planes of ochres, browns, and blacks slip one on top of each other, creating enigmatic forms, and it is not readily apparent where the glass of greenish liquid is, nor on what it rests. By this point in Picasso's development, objects depicted no longer had to make physical reference to real things, and could be reconfigured and composed in the eye of the beholder.

The glass is represented at the center right of the work, with curving base and triangular stem, topped by a spoon (that would hold sugar cubes over which chilled water would be poured into the absinthe). Elements of a guitar or mandolin have been seen by some in the painting's center (centered on the black area) and at lower right, a "cinematograph" (an early film camera and projector). In conformity, perhaps, with its subject, the image is hallucinogenic, engendering feelings of displacement and slippage.

The painting was formerly in the collection of one of Picasso's early dealers, Ambroise Vollard, and was purchased for the AMAM from Theodore Schempp, an Oberlin alumnus who became an important dealer of twentieth-century European art. Ellen Johnson wrote of the work:

Another art friend, Ted Schempp, who had graduated from Oberlin a few years before I did, had become a dealer who lived in France but frequently traveled to the States, bringing with him fine examples of the current School of Paris. As he was in New York for some time that year of the war, he let me have two paintings of my choice to hang in the apartment on West Fifty-second. Thus I had the incredible good fortune to live for several weeks with Picasso's Verre d'Absinthe, a classic analytic Cubist work, on one wall with its antithesis, a 1913-14 Kandinsky, churning up the space across from it. Of course I sent photographs to Oberlin and the predominantly conservative committee rejected the Kandinsky, as was to be expected but, as was certainly not, they snatched up the Picasso.