Still life, fruit dish

Drypoint, involving as it does the direct marking of the metal plate with an engraving tool, requires of the artist the utmost concentration and control; it is not a technique for the indecisive. Picasso was especially adept at this difficult medium. Some of his earliest prints are drypoints, or etchings with drypoint inclusions. This example of the former is from the high point of his early cubist phase, during which he and Braque had established the spatial fundamentals of the style. Like certain paintings of the same year, this still life takes its time-honoured genre into an entirely new category. The term 'analytical cubism' has been applied to the style, indicating the quasi-scientific arena of reality that Picasso and Braque were so keen to explore. Like an aftershock, a wave of energy rolls across the composition, dislodging every object from its axis. At the same time an extraordinary sense of order, which we may call cubist harmonics, stabilises the scene. In the draperies, bowls, and most of all the talismanic pears, Picasso pays obvious homage to his predecessor, Cezanne.

Art Gallery Handbook, 1999.