Early photographs of Picasso’s studio indicate that he displayed his
cardboard Guitar construction in at least two ways: as an independent
object and as part of a larger still life assemblage that also included
paper and wood (all the elements of which were long and erroneously
presumed lost). Picasso had in fact elected to save only Guitar and the
curved “tabletop” he had created to go beneath it, when he disassembled
this still life. He packed these two selected components away together,
most likely in autumn 1916, and subsequently left both pieces to the
Museum upon his death. In 2005 a query from art historian Christine
Poggi prompted the rediscovery of the tabletop in MoMA’s storage.
Reuniting the tabletop with the Guitar for the first time since Picasso
packed them away together almost a century ago prompts reconsideration
of the distinct yet interrelated histories of two of his most iconic
works. The cardboard Guitar’s variable modes of installation are
characteristic of Picasso’s combinatory process during the two years
that separate its creation in 1912 from its reiteration in sheet metal
in 1914. Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 is the first time that the cardboard
Guitar is publicly exhibited with this distinctive element.
In
1914 the artist memorialized his fragile, papery Guitar construction in
more fixed and durable sheet metal form. No welding holds together the
planes of the construction; instead it is sewn together with wire in
just a few ingeniously selected spots. Its projecting planes create a
sense of volume, generating real shadows rather than the rendered
shading historically used to simulate depth in painted and graphic art.
Though closely related to the cardboard Guitar, it is very different in
texture, color, pliancy, and durability.
Central to the
exhibition are a selection of photographs taken by Picasso of
in-progress or recently completed works, staged for his own small,
hand-held camera. Several of these images capture the cardboard Guitar,
surrounded by works on paper, installed in the artist’s Paris studio.
Copies of the avant-garde journal Les Soirées de Paris, no.18, in which
photographs of Picasso’s radical Cubist assemblages were first
published, are also on display. The exhibition includes a sketchbook of
over 100 drawings from 1913, presented in a digital kiosk, highlighting
the artist’s interrelated working processes as a draughtsman and a
sculptor and his particular focus on the subjects of a figure playing a
guitar and a still life with a guitar.
Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914
affords a rich picture of Picasso’s process as he engaged with
different materials, mediums, and techniques in an extraordinary
cross-pollination of practices. Among the notable works on view are:
Guitar (1912), Siphon, Glass, Newspaper, and Violin (1912), Musical
Score and Guitar (1912), Violin Hanging on the Wall (1912–13), Guitar
(1913), and Bar Table with Guitar (1913). For his painting Guitar, from
1912, Picasso paired traditional craftsman’s techniques used to imitate
wood-graining and marble with bold, contoured planes. In the still life
composition Siphon, Glass, Newspaper, and Violin, Picasso incorporated
cut-and-pasted newspaper as both figure and ground, complicating the
space occupied by his graphic still life.
Like pieces of a crude
jigsaw puzzle, the cut-and-pasted components of the 1912 collage Musical
Score and Guitar fit together in a summary account of an instrument’s
contours. The commercially printed sheet music included in the work
evokes the popular cabaret songs of Picasso’s life in Paris. Color and
texture erupt across the surface of the 1912–13 painting Violin Hanging
on the Wall. For the bold curves of the instrument’s body, Picasso mixed
together grit and rough commercial spackle to create an unusually rough
crust of impasto. These heterogeneous ingredients, rarely associated
with fine art, mark this painting as among the most materially radical
in Picasso’s long career.
The near abstraction of Guitar, from
1913, seems opposed to the legibility of the cardboard and sheet metal
constructions with which it shares a name. Featuring roughly cut pieces
of colored paper and worn wallpaper fragments—which Picasso purportedly
tore off the walls to incorporate into his artwork—Guitar suggests a
rapidity in execution, contrasting with Picasso’s conceptually rigorous
play with the minimum means of referencing a real object. Visitors to
Picasso’s studio in the years before World War I remarked that his works
barely seemed “to possess the physical stamina necessary to survive”;
and yet Bar Table with Guitar, held together with nothing more than
pins, has preserved its improvisatory air. Featuring brightly colored
papers typical of Picasso’s work in spring 1913 in Céret, it is
embellished with a few additions of chalk and charcoal, and provides a
strong contrast with the works that had filled the artist’s studio the
previous winter: relatively austere newspaper clippings pasted on a
white paper support.
The Museum of Modern Art
Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914
February 13–June 6, 2011
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor
