Sheet Music and Guitar

‘The simplicity and purity of line in Picasso’s drawings during the final stage of Analiytical Cubism (1909 to 1912) continue to develop in the years of the First World War and throughout his neoclassical period (1918 to 1924). A renewed interest in the work of the nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as revealed in Picasso’s realistic portrait studies of 1914 and 1915, further nourished his concentration on draftsmanship. As Alfred Barr, Jr. has noted, even in 1921, the same year this still life was painted, Picasso was producing classic line drawings in the style of Ingres and Raphael (BAAR, Alfred H. Jr. Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art. 3rd ed. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946, p. 120).

A fine example of the artist’s use of composed geometrical forms, the present painting was executed only months before perhaps the greatest Cubist paintings oof the early 1920—Picasso’s two versions of the Three Musicians (MOMA, New York, Z.IV.331 y Philadelphia Museum of Art, Z.IV.332). The characteristics of Synthetic Cubism that distinguish these works are evident also in the painting under discussion. Here, the artist has combined the techniques of line drawing and the use of angular color fields to create form out of flatness.

The black parallel lines of the sheet music and the stringed musical instrument establish a horizontality that is reinforced by the oval tabletop and its rectilinear base. Despite the multiple color fields, it is the black lines that support and unify the overall composition. They also animate the surface by creating the impression that the underlying color fields are not flat, isolated entities but intermingled parts of a three-dimensional composition. The wide surrounding band of beige adds definition and depth, as well as locking the various elements into place. Traces of red undertones are evident. Also, particularly in the white-painted areas of the canvas, other images are visible, but their exact nature is unclear. The clean separation of the geometrical forms and the simple uncluttered composition convey a sense of purified abstraction, a strange harmony in a synthesized vision of lines, straight edges, and hard angles’.

Text: GIMÉNEZ, Carmen (ed). Collection Museo Picasso Málaga. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2003, p. 83-84.