Still Life with Skull, Leeks, and Pitcher belongs to a lengthy series of still life paintings that Picasso produced on the themes of war, death, and suffering during the years of World War II, when he was living in Paris under German Occupation. Most commonly, Picasso’s paintings of this period feature a grim expressiveness emanating from a dark and lifeless palette of black and grays, stark and even monstrous distortions of form, and closed-off, claustrophobic pictorial spaces. The distressing tenor of such work was set by his famous antiwar mural Guernica, painted in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

In this particular painting, the color scheme and overall mood is brighter, despite the presence of the grimacing skull, a reminder of death relating to the long tradition of memento mori and vanitas themes in Western art. The leeks, as Picasso reported in conversation, substitute for crossed bones but also add a note of organic vitality that contrasts with the cold white form of the death’s-head. The pitcher, which may symbolize a human figure standing and contemplating the skull, is bold in scale and patterning as well as in its use of the red, white, and blue colors of the French flag. The sharp angulations of the table and background are painted in mostly pastel hues and include a ray of golden sunlight that reflects off the wall and down across the black shadow on the side of the skull. All in all, the lighter, more optimistic feeling of this work must reflect, in March 1945, Picasso’s anticipation of a rapid conclusion to the war.

-Steve A. Nash, Masterworks of European Painting in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1999)