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©Pablo Picasso - The Buffet 'Catalan' 1943

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From Sotheby's:
The still life developed as Picasso's preferred motif during World War II, for in the commonplace subject he found a means of escape. Thus rather than documenting the chaotic reality of his surroundings, he successfully created an alternate, meticulously structured reality. Frances Morris wrote of Picasso's still lifes of the early 1940s: “above all it was the still-life genre that Picasso developed into a tool capable of evoking the most complex blend of pathos and defiance, of despair to hope, balancing personal and universal experience in an expression of extraordinary emotional power. The hardship of daily life, the fragility of human existence and the threat of death are themes that haunt Picasso's still-life paintings of the war and Liberation periods”
(Frances Morris, Paris Post War, Art and Existentialism 1945-1955 (exhibition catalogue), Tate Gallery, London, 1993, p. 155).