In an interior scene, several objects rest on an oval table top: a jug, a fruit and a cranium, all schematised. The composition is outstanding for its skilful colouring in yellow, ochre and red tones that harmonise with greens and greys. It is a good example of the luminous painting of Bores, of his manner of merely suggesting objects, of the plastic value he attached to colour and brushwork, and of his goal of attaining the enjoyment of painting in itself. Even so, there is something intriguing about the inclusion of the skull in such a luminous environment. Bores, who, like other avant-garde artists of his time, was a great painter of still lifes, thus ties into one of the classic traditional types of this genre, the memento mori (‘remember that you die’). This presence is perhaps less surprising if we bear in mind that any allusion to death is also necessarily a reference to life, which converges in this oil on the jouissance of purely pictorial values that was a constant in Bores. The twentieth-century avantgardes often return to the subject of the vanitas as an allusion to the fleetingness of time, though they evade the strident religious rhetoric of some Baroque painters. This is the line followed by this still life, which exudes the artist’s habitual sense of balance and atmosphere of intimacy.

When he executed this painting, Bores was already an established painter and his work had entered its final phase known to critics as “the white manner”, not so much because of a predominance of that colour as because of his method. As he stated himself, he aspired towards greater luminosity while at the same time disembodying the figure. Such an aspiration was similar to that of abstract painting but brought about by figurative means, and it sought above all to achieve a special transparency. As seen here, it led him to a light painting with a free and loose composition. Since settling in Paris in the mid-1920s, Bores’s language had been characterised by an emphasis on light and colour united with a “lyrical figuration”. From the 1930s onwards, the painter endowed this type of figuration, of which he was one of the chief exponents, with certain particularities that he summed up under the name of “fruit painting”, a reference to the notion of painting as a sensual act. In Paris, his work had been permeated by the consequences he drew from late Cubism, following especially Juan Gris’s method of approaching the picture as an abstract composition in which allusions to reality gradually appear. The overt inclination on the picture plane of the tabletop in Nature morte au pichet is a good example of this personal assimilation of the Cubist lesson. The need to add spontaneity and intuition to Cubism that he felt from the 1920s and 1930s onwards remained as a substratum up to his still lifes of the 1960s.

The canvas was painted in the same year as his intimate friend and patron Tériade published a monograph on him with a text by Jean Grenier. Dating from this same period is the Still Life in gouache on paper that joined the collection of Banco de España more recently. Both works reflect the persistence in his late pieces of the main tenets of the Paris School, and they are excellent testimonies to his renewal of the genre of the still life in the modernist art of the twentieth century.

Maite Méndez Baiges

One of the most striking qualities of Francisco Bores’ works is their sense of balance and intimacy. He knew the paintings of the first generation of the Paris School well and incorporated features of synthetic cubism, especially as exemplified by Juan Gris. Like Gris, Bores began his paintings as abstracts and later added allusions to reality. With the exception of those painted around 1928, his works always includes some reference to the visual world. Still life with Jug (1961) dates from one of the most interesting periods of his career, when his search for space was characterised by a strong feeling of harmony in composition. The relationship between the various elements that make up the still-life and the way in which they stand separate from each other and from their surroundings are perfectly crafted via the even distribution of light. Elongated forms and colour take centre stage: ochres, yellows and reds are blended perfectly with the greens and greys for which Bores was renowned, in a display of his expressive sincerity. The subject matter also reflects the great tradition of still-life painting with the inclusion in the foreground of the hint of a skull, a feature often found in classic vanitas and contemporary works alike. Cases in point are the works by Pablo Picasso painted in the 1930s and 40s against a backdrop of political unrest in Europe. Bores painted this canvas in the same year that his close friend and supporter Tériade published a monograph on him, featuring a text by Jean Grenier. At around the same time he painted the gouache Still-life (1960), recently added to the Banco de España Collection, which provides further evidence that his later works still show traces of the tenets of the Paris School and his life-long debt to cubism. As such, this work is largely indistinguishable from his cubist paintings of the 1930s.

• Julián Gállego Serrano
• María José Alonso
• Carlos Martín