Still life with melon

The oil pastels produce a composition which cleverly alludes to the subject through simple, dreamy outlines confidently executed on a white background. The tones – pink, blue, pale green, yellow – are full of freshness. Picasso's graphic activity was particularly feverish in 1948. In that year he produced 125 lithographs for Pierre Reverdy's Le Chant des Morts and aquatints to illustrate Gongora's Vingt Poemes. In the same year he also attended the Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Poland. The ideographic schematism of this painting – the result of a successfully gauged definition of the representational space – is close to that of the celebrated La cuisine of November 1948 (New York, Museum of Modern Art).