Cafetera azul (Blue Coffeepot)

After moving to Paris in 1946, Otero’s style, which was once defined by luministic landscapes, began to shift dramatically as he began to experiment with a modernist, cubist style through still lifes of pitchers and coffeepots, as exemplified here by Cafetera azul. In his subsequent works, three-dimensional space was progressively replaced by the interplay of line and color on the flat plane (see Untitled by Otero). The dominance of these new elements was fully realized in his Coloritmos series, begun in 1955, in which he placed contrasting dark and light colors together in vertical bands in such a way that would create a sense of vibration upon the two-dimensional plane.