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Dimensions: approx. 50 by 76.5cm., 19 1/2 by 30in.

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Provenance: Jacques Dubourg collection, France
Private collection, Germany
Acquired by present owner in 2001

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Literature: Herman Berninger and Jean-Albert Cartier, Pougny: Catalogue de L'Oeuvre, vol. 2, Office du Livre, Zurich, 1972, p.94, 319.

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Notes:

Still life with Hat and Clock is a good example of Jean Pougny's approach to still lifes in his Parisian period. The still life had dominated the artist's oeuvre since as early as 1917 - he transformed this humble genre into a testing ground for his ideas. This experimental period started with a series of more Realist paintings, in which he explored spatial relations between objects, then went through a Cubo-Futuristic period, resulting in a series of highly structured Purist works by 1920.

Indeed, by the early 1920s Pougny's still lifes were based almost totally on the decomposition of their elements into layers of simple geometrical forms. However, from about 1924 objects in the artist's still lifes began to regain their depth and volume and even to cast shadows. It seems that rather than the objects themselves, it was the meaning and symbolism of the compositions created by their juxtaposition that fascinated Pougny.

While at first sight Still life with Hat and Clock appears to be a merely accidental collection of items left on the table, it has a powerful, enchanting appeal. The artist breathes life into ordinary inanimate objects, endowing them with a distinct personality of their own. His interest here seems to be in capturing particular intimate moments in their existence.

Apart from the knife in the foreground, the objects in this painting are all in physical contact with each other as if to signify an underlying intricate symbolic connection between them. The shadows they throw and the uneven colours of the wall and the table convey a sense of movement to everything on the canvas. This still life is nothing but still: while the hands of the clock are rotating, the pages of the blue album and the small book flutter, as if trying to jump out, the hat is precariously balancing on the corner of the large green tome that is kept in its place by the curvaceous bottle, which too seems as if it is about to join the dance.