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Lot Essay
Musical instruments such as the guitar or the banjo are recurring motifs in Picasso's work of the 1910s and 1920s. These instruments appear in some of his most rigorous analytical cubist compositions of 1910-1911 and formed the basis for both of his earliest experiments with papiers collés in 1912, as well as his revolutionary first construction, the sheet-metal and wire sculpture Guitare (Zervos, vol. 2, no. 773; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The guitar featured in one of Picasso's largest and boldest statements of synthetic cubism, Les trois musiciens of 1921 (Zervos, vol. 4, no. 331), as well as in scores of still life compositions. Part of the appeal of the guitar for Picasso (who, unlike Georges Braque, had no particular love of music), was no doubt its well-established association with his Spanish homeland, which also explains its frequent role in the work of Juan Gris.
Robert Rosenblum has written: "For Picasso, the guitar was the king of Cubist musical instruments, as well as being a ubiquitous presence in both his pre- and post-Cubist works. Its isolation by Picasso as a virtual emblem was conspicuous in 1912, when the guitar became the fundamental motif for his adventurous new assembled sculptures. The anthropomorphic potential of the guitar recommended it especially to a quick-change magician who could sometimes recreate it as a female nude (in Spanish popular culture, playing a guitar is often equated with love-making) or as a more stiffly geometric male presence that might even be another of Picasso's alter egos, a point borne out by the fact that in the New York version of the Three Musicians (1921), the red-and-yellow harlequin, identifiable as a symbolic self-portrait, plays a guitar” (quoted in J. Brown, ed., Picasso and the Spanish Tradition, New Haven, 1996, pp. 78-79).
The present work, which belongs to a series of three representations of instruments drawn in 1926 in blue pastel—the banjo, mandolin and guitar (fig. 1)—is a focused examination of the instrument's character, and potentially a depiction of its personality in contrast to its stringed compatriots.
Robert Rosenblum has written: "For Picasso, the guitar was the king of Cubist musical instruments, as well as being a ubiquitous presence in both his pre- and post-Cubist works. Its isolation by Picasso as a virtual emblem was conspicuous in 1912, when the guitar became the fundamental motif for his adventurous new assembled sculptures. The anthropomorphic potential of the guitar recommended it especially to a quick-change magician who could sometimes recreate it as a female nude (in Spanish popular culture, playing a guitar is often equated with love-making) or as a more stiffly geometric male presence that might even be another of Picasso's alter egos, a point borne out by the fact that in the New York version of the Three Musicians (1921), the red-and-yellow harlequin, identifiable as a symbolic self-portrait, plays a guitar” (quoted in J. Brown, ed., Picasso and the Spanish Tradition, New Haven, 1996, pp. 78-79).
The present work, which belongs to a series of three representations of instruments drawn in 1926 in blue pastel—the banjo, mandolin and guitar (fig. 1)—is a focused examination of the instrument's character, and potentially a depiction of its personality in contrast to its stringed compatriots.