The Kitchen

Pablo Picasso, 1948

Technical Details

About This Work

This large, nearly monochromatic canvas depicts the kitchen of Picasso's apartment at the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris. The room is rendered as a network of lines and planes — pots, pans, birds in a cage, and kitchen implements reduced to their essential geometry. The work is one of Picasso's most abstract paintings and one of the most radical explorations of the relationship between representation and pure form.

Painted in the apartment where Picasso had lived throughout the Occupation, The Kitchen reflects his continued engagement with Cubist principles in the post-war period. It was acquired by MoMA in 1950 and remains one of the museum's most challenging and important late Picasso works.

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Valuation & Provenance

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