The fine art of cigars

A popular story about Spanish painter Pablo Picasso is that a cigar saved his life, at birth.

He was thought to be stillborn after the usual attempts to get him to cry failed. The nurses had given up and shifted their focus to his mother. In an inspired moment, his uncle Salvador, who was a doctor, blew cigar smoke into Pablo’s nostrils, giving his lungs a kick-start that brought on his first cries.

This started a lifelong love for cigars that endured until his death at the age of 91. Beyond his smoking of cigars, they showed up in his art, such as his Smoker With A Sword. His small, wooden sculpture titled Cigare was bought for over $1m at a Christie’s auction in 2013.

Associated with prestige and luxury, cigars and cigar smoking have made their way through the art, literary, music and entertainment worlds, depicted in various ways and through various mediums.

In Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, French painter Edouard Manet depicts a man sitting at a table, lit cigar in hand. In her painting The Black Marketeer, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen shows a man in a suit, sitting in an office with a box of cigars close at hand.

I am still trying to get my hands on the coffee table book The Cigar In Art published in 1996 which shows artwork featuring cigars from an array of artists including Paul Cadmus, Frida Kahlo, Leroy Neiman, John Singer Sargent and Diego Rivera.

The last 20 years of Cigar Aficionado magazine covers are a veritable who’s who of cigars smokers from film, music and sports, including Arnold Schwarznegger, Jack Nicholson, Fidel Castro, Jay Z, Laurence Fishburne, Ron Perlman, Demi Moore, Sylvester Stallone, Michael Jordan, Danny DeVito and Steve Harvey, to name a few. The photographs are artworks in their own right, deserving of a place on the wall of a private or public cigar lounge.

Exploring artwork that incorporates and/or pays homage to cigars and cigar smoking is a wonderful rabbit hole that spans the serious to the frivolous. Cigar art is everywhere.

Iain Leyden (@bigiainie), a Scotsman based in Poland, is a cigar band artist who has combined his two loves, cigars and whiskey, to create pictures. I love the pieces he did of David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Freddie Mercury, and his Mona Ligero artwork gets my respect for the naming of it.

On The Black Art Depot, Light Em Up by Dion J Pollard would look good on the wall of the private cigar lounge — and in my home one day.

Congolese artist Zemba Luzamba’s Cigar, Cognac and Cheese captures the feeling of comfort and calm that come with cigars, depicting two men dressed in suits and sharing a cigar.

On the lighthearted side, cigar-related memes, T-shirts, posters and digital graphics are numerous, with quotes such as: “I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time” (Mark Twain), “Some people meditate, I smoke cigars” (Ron Perlman) and “There are two things worth living for, one is a good cigar, the other is a better one” (Raul Julia).

I have spent countless hours looking at cigar-related images and paintings and have created a Pinterest board dedicated to cigars. Over the years, I have connected with cigar enthusiasts around the world, sharing, particularly through Instagram, the cigars we enjoy and what we enjoy them with — whether whiskey, cognac, wine, tea or water.

We share a bond — a love for the art of cigars.