Still Life on a Pedestal Table, Pablo Picasso, 1931, Oil on Canvas, Musse Picasso, Paris

Picasso's images of the women in his life can be seen as a diary, where he recorded the highs and lows of his romantic encounters. At the time this picture was produced (1931) his relationship with Olga Koklova, a Russian ballerina to whom he had been married to since 1918, was coming to an end. Picasso had met and deeply fallen in love with Marie-Therese Walter, he tried to keep their relationship a secret from his wife. This picture is a consequence of that situation.

Picasso wanted to paint portraits of Marie-Therese, to be able to express his passions and to portray the beauty and sexuality he saw in his new muse. Because their relationship was a clandestine affair, Picasso set about producing a picture that is on the surface a still life, the idea is enhanced by the title. The viewer can see the arrangement of objects on the table, the stripped table cloth, yellow jug and white fruit bowl containing purple plums, the tripod legs of the table sit on the squared patterned rug,the whole composition is in a corner of a room.

But if we look beyond the surface we can reveal a second, completely different picture, the painter expresses his feelings of beauty, passion and sexual desire, the elements of the still life take on a new meaning. The jug becomes the female form, it's curves evoke the shapely form of the female figure, the three purple plums represent the breasts and buttocks. The two green apples on the centre of the table become the piercing eyes of his lover as well as being representative of female breasts. A more Freudian aspect can be seen in the way his sexual desires are represented, the white table leg becomes a phallus symbol (complete with testicles) which is placed between the two legs that straddle the bottom of the picture. Picasso also uses colour to symbolise his emotions, the use of red evokes the dangerous passions of this affair the yellow of the jug and the shadow on the wall relate to the long blonde hair of Marie-Therese.

Once this secondary picture starts to reveal its self we see that Picasso fills the whole composition with symbolic images that express his feelings of passion, beauty and sexual desire