Still Life Table

In this homage to the Cubist masters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Saul Steinberg borrows their vocabulary to make his own Cubist still life. The curving form with a black circle alludes to the guitars often seen in early Cubist images. His brass nameplate is nailed to what appears to be a violin. The tack heads speckle a form akin to an absinthe glass, sculptures of which Picasso famously painted with polka dots. The half cylinder and the gouged-out area above it draw attention to the spatial ambiguities set up by the seemingly—but not really—overlapping planes throughout the image.