Lot Essay
This work is related to a series of drawings in blue pastel which explore the theme of a guitar or mandoline, executed in sketchbook no. 92, 1926 (op. cit. Je Suis Le Cahier, p. 144). These also share elements with the collages executed in the same year (op.cit. Je Suis le Cahier, p. 113, figs. 1 and 2). The visual markers in these drawings point to the distinctive features of the collages: "Dramatically skewered to the surface of the canvas, Picasso's guitars inflict a kind of bodily damage on that very surface, rendering it tactile in a new way ... The nails that pierce, the needles that prick, the barbs that spur, shift the objects on which they operate from the realm of the visual to that of the purely physical, as surely as, say, the later manipulations of Lucio Fontana's knife of the slashed bodies of his canvas fields" (see Ed. A. and M. Glimcher, Je Suis Le Cahier, the Sketchbooks of Picasso, London, 1986, pp. 136-137).