The Hermitage still life Fruit in a Vase is built like a panoramic view (seen from above) of a group of objects situated on the deserted plain of a round table. It was perhaps because he so prized this ambiguous feeling of still life/landscape that Picasso left the painting unfinished, preserving its ghostliness, refusing to make the objects materialise fully. Here, in this concept of still life, with its pauses of empty spaces and its logical interchange of planes, the overall effect reminds one of a landscape’s illusory space. In another work, the landscape Little House in a Garden (La Rue-des-Bois), Picasso created a three-dimensional impression on the principles of Braque’s tactile, manual still life space. And yet in that work, the absence of any sort of analysis, the many smeared forms in the motif, the capriciously rhythmical lines of arabesques, do not speak of a search for real space, but rather tell us that spatial confinement is what the artist needs to heighten the drama of forces locked in battle. One force is Nature with the turbulent, vital energy of its greenery and the pathetic gesticulation of the dead tree; the other is the neatly arranged buildings with their blank walls and sharp, geometric edges.

This drama, heightened by the strictly controlled relationship of the cold mineral colours and the tension of the composition, balancing on a razor’s edge, overwhelms the “inertia” of a pure landscape; the painting echoes, as it were, the conflicts of the real world. This final impression corresponds to Picasso’s original idea: to make this piece of nature the background for a composition with figures, conceived in the winter and spring of 1909.

Referring to the transformation of the composition Carnival at the Bistro into the still life Bread and Fruit Bowl on a Table, Pierre Daix believes Picasso “could not have better expressed the thought that, at that stage, every object or character is, above all, a certain spatial rhythm, a three-dimensional structure which plays its role in the composition through what it brings to the pictorial structure of the whole and not through its own reality. Here he again borders on abstraction. He will treat the Woman with a Fan and Queen Isabeau exactly like still lifes.”[26] Such views, however, are hardly correct, for Picasso at that stage was still very far from abstraction. Actually his desire to achieve a full and unified plastic structure for the pictorial whole (for which he depends on Cézanne’s modulated tones which model forms) does not contradict his fundamentally literary quality and does not negate the personal realities of the object and characters. Indeed, the metamorphosis of the figure scene into the Bread and Fruit Bowl on a Table clearly reveals the semantic (not just the plastic) value of the still life’s object-motifs for Picasso: a bowl of fruit has replaced the female figure in the composition, while the elongated loaves of bread and overturned cup replace the rhythms and forms of the two male characters. An allegorical still life? Whether it is or not, the characteristics of Picasso’s objects and figures invariably relate to an internal meaning, as is apparent, for instance, in Queen Isabeau, Woman with a Fan and Woman with a Mandolin.