Two very distinctive stages can be identified in the creative career of Pancho Cossío. The first, after his formative years, began with an incursion into the avant-garde codes of Ultraism and reached full maturity in Paris during the second half of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. During this period, the painter from Cantabria was one of the Spanish artists in the circle of lyrical figuration who received the most support from the Cahiers d'Art journal run by Zervos and Tériade. This was followed by a disconcerting decade-long parenthesis in his pictorial practice, when his creative work was virtually abandoned in favour of political activism as one of the founding members of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. In the 1940s he happily returned to painting and entered the second and final stage of his career, developing a masterful syntax in which the interplay of transparencies and bright glints submerged his stylised synthetic evocation of objects in a subtle, enveloping atmosphere. In Cossío's case, this diction had been distilled from a cross between tradition and modernity that included Venetian and Flemish paradigms as well as the Parisian avant-garde, an equation that Gaya Nuño would translate as the grassroots formula of "old wine in new wineskins". In its lyrical fading of the objective world, Cossío's mature work occasionally approached the boundary of abstraction, though he never actually crossed it except in a few isolated experiments.

In both periods of his career, but above all in the second, the still life would become the dominant theme and masterly pinnacle of Cossío's painting. Bodegón de la caja de puros [Still Life with Cigar Box] is a good example of this genre, and it also illustrates the incredibly subtle divestiture that his perception of the objectual world would attain at the height of his creative powers. Although painted thirteen years later, the distinctive iconic motif of this composition, the cigar box, is related to an earlier seminal work, the famous Dos mesas [Two Tables] (1954, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) that finally earned Cossío the long-awaited distinction of a first-place medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition. The relative elevation of the table towards the vertical axis of the depiction was a recurring device in Cossío's still lifes since his years spent in Paris. Yet in a game that somehow inverts the equation used in the abovementioned canvas from 1954, in this second still life with a cigar box the white tablecloth assigns a central role to the impact of light: on this dazzling, snow-white radiance, the ghostly traces of flowers and objects weave their dance of indistinct glimmers. [Fernando Huici March]