Pablo Picasso Goat Skull, Bottle, and Candle

Angela Liu:

Let your eyes wander across this intriguing combination of objects: a goat’s skull, a bottle, and a candle. Two are everyday items, yet they are joined by a grim, morbid companion. Even more intriguing, Picasso made two versions of this theme—once as a painting, and once as a sculpture, both seen here. What is so compelling about this image that drew Picasso to it again and again?

Picasso began working on the sculpture in 1951, and he made the painting in 1952. He then completed the sculpture in 1953. Why did he jump back and forth? Picasso once said, ‘Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.’ Like he is performing a magic trick, Picasso manages to pull his ideas about shapes and perspectives from the two-dimensional painting into the real world.

Let’s start with this painting. Notice how the round vase is emphasised by the angular lines at the top. As you look down, the vase appears almost three-dimensional, as if it’s carved from a block.

Now let’s look at the sculpture. Even though it’s now an object in real space, the vase seems much flatter than in the painting. You can imagine how Picasso delighted in transforming our perception of reality through both works—conjuring a voluminous body in a painting while he flattens out real objects. And that’s not his only playful trick. Take a look at the horns in the sculpture. These are actually the handlebars of a bicycle!

NARRATOR:

These two works, an oil painting and a sculpture, are both titled Goat Skull, Bottle, and Candle. They were created by Pablo Picasso between 1951 and 1953. The painting has a height of eighty-nine centimetres and a width of 116 centimetres. The sculpture, made of painted bronze, is seventy-nine centimetres tall, ninety-three centimetres wide, and fifty-four centimetres deep.

Both the painting and the sculpture are dark grey in colour and feature three key elements: a goat skull, a bottle, and a lit candle. The objects are arranged similarly: the goat skull is positioned on the right, the long-necked bottle on the left with the lit candle emerging from its mouth. The sculpture feels like a rendition of the painting and vice versa.

In the painting, created in 1952, the goat skull occupies about two-thirds of the canvas. Positioned on the right, it faces the bottle with the candle, which is about the same height. The skull is painted with sharp lines in a contrasting palette of white and dark grey that accentuates its contours. The horns rise from the crown, curving in a horizontal S-shape to the right. A pair of round eye sockets is vertically aligned in the middle of the skull, above the lower jaw with four front teeth. The long neck and broader body of the bottle look like they are imprinted within a cuboid shape. Above its mouth is a short white slab radiating short beams of light. A large beam, shaped like a long triangle, projects diagonally from the candle to the frontal part of the skull.

The sculpture, created between 1951 and 1953, is mounted on a rectangular base. The goat skull on the right is about a third as wide as the base and half as tall as the bottle with the candle, positioned on the left. The skull has a rough, corrugated surface. The mouth points diagonally towards the lower left, and the eyes are protruding, round, and bead-like. The pair of horns resemble bicycle handlebars. The bottle on the left consists of two intersecting bronze sheets. From a frontal view, the bottle’s right shoulder curves outwards, while the left shoulder curves inwards, ending in a sharp corner. The left side of the bottleneck has a small angular handle. Rising from the bottle is a short cylindrical protrusion topped with a round object, from which twenty bronze spikes of varying lengths radiate.