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拍品专文
Pablo Picasso painted Homme à la guitare in Céret in the summer of 1913, an important moment in the midst of the rapid series of pictorial revolutions that define Cubism. Composed of planes of vibrant color, pattern, and letters, combined with passages of highly textured paint, encaustic, and in places, sand, this large-scale portrait, formerly in the legendary collection of Gertrude Stein and subsequently, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, stands as a bold declaration of the new direction that Picasso’s art took at this time. Featuring one of his most beloved and important motifs—the man and the guitar—this work announces the arrival of Synthetic Cubism, the second stage of Picasso’s epoch-defining cubist adventure. “His only large canvas of the period,” John Richardson has described, it is also the last large-scale work from 1913 in private hands (quoted in A Life of Picasso, The Painter of Modern Life, 1907-1917, London, 2009, vol. II, p. 278).
Over the course of the twelve months prior to his creation of this work, Picasso, together with his friend and cubist comrade, Georges Braque, had made a series of artistic leaps, integrating found objects in cubist collages, pasted paper pieces in their papier collés, and latterly, inventing three-dimensional cubist constructions and assemblages that once again radically redefined the parameters of artmaking. During his stay in Céret in the spring and summer of 1913, Picasso was exploring and experimenting with the artistic repercussions of these breakthroughs, scrutinizing form—both pictorial and material—as he moved effortlessly between painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture, each medium informing his work in the other. Homme à la guitare marks the synthesis of these different developments, as well as occupying a deeply personal place in the life of the artist.
Picasso had arrived in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees in March 1913. On this, his third stay there, he traveled with his partner of the time, Eva Gouel, the enigmatic “ma jolie,” as he referred to her in his painting. In May 1912, his long-term relationship with Fernande Olivier had come to an explosive end when she left him for another artist. Picasso had already been enjoying a clandestine relationship with Eva, who would after this point become the artist’s offical muse and lover. Returning to Céret, Picasso and Eva once again rented the ground floor of the Maison Delcros, and were soon joined by painter and poet, Max Jacob. Happy to be away from Paris and its demands, the artist set to work. “I’m behaving very badly towards all my friends,” Picasso wrote to his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on 11 April 1913. “I’m not writing to anyone, but I’m working; I’m working on projects and I’m not forgetting any one of you” (quoted in Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 416).
Notably for this sojourn, Braque was not present. In contrast to the previous years during which they were, as Braque later described, tethered together like mountain climbers, at this time he was happily ensconced in Sorgues. Though Picasso missed his company—“it’s really too bad that the telephone at your place doesn’t reach Céret,” he wrote to him (quoted in J. Richardson, op. cit., 2009, p. 276)—tellingly, unlike other trips he did not implore him to come and join him. Their art, which had in the past few years, been almost indistinguishable, was beginning to diverge, the pair no longer responding to the each other with the same sense of immediacy and intensity as previous years.
Upon his arrival in Céret, Picasso began a new series of papier collés, expanding and building upon the possibilities of this art form that Braque had pioneered in the autumn of 1912. Already by this point, the artists had found that Analytical Cubism had reached its natural conclusion. As a result, they began to reintroduce life into their work, gradually relaxing the dense webs of lines and facets that had constructed their hermetic compositions, and reintegrating color once more. Stenciled lettering began to appear, before real objects, pieces of wallpaper and faux-bois, and carefully chosen cuttings of newspapers and ephemera. As a result, Cubism was transformed as reality itself was integrated into the two-dimensional confines of the canvas, thereby opening up new directions in the conception not only of a painting, but of art itself.
This clearer, bolder cubist idiom, constructed with larger, flattened planes would become the defining characteristic of Synthetic Cubism, which Picasso explored at pace throughout 1913. The pieces of paper used to construct the compositions fed into his work in oil paint—as seen in the present work, with its interlocking arrangement of painted planes of deep blue and green, together with luminous red and orange. “The changes in structure make [Picasso’s] paintings look simpler, flatter, clearer, bolder—and also less mysterious or metaphysical,” Elizabeth Cowling has described. “Not that they became unambiguous and direct. Far from it. But the strangeness of shadowy, immeasurable spaces and indeterminate forms and the equivocation of Mallarméen ‘suggestion’ were replaced by witty visual metaphors and puns” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, pp. 262-263).
Here, the figure of the man and the guitar are converted into a union of repeating shapes and signs: the curving silhouette of the guitar is echoed in the faceted shape of the man’s head, these semi-circular forms cascading down to convey the volume of his bust and torso, while the black circle of the instrument’s soundhole finds its equivalent in his head, standing as a single eye. A painted still life occupies the right hand side of the canvas, the famous Bass beer label, an integral cubist symbol, emblazoned over the partially painted outlines of two bottles, which themselves mimic the form of the figure’s distinctive black top hat. These playful visual rhythms and equivalences define Synthetic Cubism.
Picasso turned to his famed motif of the man playing the guitar to explore these latest developments in the spring of 1913. Earlier in the year, Picasso had created a large assemblage of this subject in his studio on the boulevard Raspail in Paris. In this playful—and highly radical work—Picasso set a real tabletop, with a bottle, cup, pipe, and newspaper, in front of a large canvas with a drawn and painted cubist figure of a man holding, with cut out newspaper arms, an actual guitar. A painted and constructed violin can also be seen hanging on the upper right hand side of the canvas. Once arranged, Picasso then photographed his assemblage—memorializing this ephemeral composition in time, as if he had created a living art work on a pictorial stage.
Marrying the real and the represented, the three-dimensional and two-dimensional, this assemblage paved the way for Picasso’s artistic production in Céret. There, Picasso’s evident fascination with the man and guitar as the vehicle through which to play with this concept of transformation from idea to form, figure to object, painting to sculpture, materialized in both his sketchbooks from this period, as well as his papier collés, and the present painting. Over the course of his drawings of this period, the form and structure of the guitar player is broken down and reimagined in myriad ways, built from vertical strips and interlocking planes, or conveyed in some of the more diagrammatic drawings in a squared paper carnet, as possible three-dimensional constructions (see for example Carnet des dessins cubistes, nos. MP1865 (25r) and (46r), Musée national Picasso, Paris). Homme à la guitare stands at the heart of this fascinating preoccupation as Picasso transformed the guitar player construction into oil—the painted conclusion of the idea born in the initial assemblage. Where the forms of the figure had been reimagined as solid, interconnecting parts, here, Picasso reimagined this construction in flat planes of bold color and pattern.
Despite being deeply immersed in these exciting material explorations, Picasso was called home to Barcelona at the end of March 1913 as his father José Ruiz y Blasco had taken ill. A few weeks later, at the beginning of May, he heard news that his father had worsened and rushed to Spain to be with him. He died on 3 May; “You can imagine the state I’m in,” Picasso wrote to Kahnweiler (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1989, p. 417). Later in the month, Picasso’s beloved dog, Frika, passed away, while Eva also fell ill, the start of the illness that would ultimately lead to her untimely death in 1915. “I hope that Pablo will get back to work again,” she wrote to Stein, “as that is the only thing that can make him forget his sorrow a little” (quoted in P. Daix and J. Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 300).
While there is no overt sign of these bereavements in Picasso’s work of this period, the presence of black planes in a number of his papier collés, as well as the minimal, austere quality of some of them, could be seen to reflect his grief. John Richardson wrote of Homme à la guitare that “the man in a tall Córdoban hat holding a guitar…could well be a memorial to his father... the oddly discordant café still life in half-mourning mauve on the right could refer to don José’s heyday in the cafes of Málaga” (op. cit., 2009, p. 278). In this way, this large and impressive painting is not only a bold example of the artist’s latest pictorial explorations, but can also be seen as a poignant testament to Picasso’s father, himself an artist, who would remain a central presence in his work for the rest of his life. Years later, Picasso told the photographer, Brassaï, “Every time I draw a man, involuntarily I think of my father. For me, man is ‘Don José,’ and that will be true all my life. He wore a beard. All the men I draw have more or less his features” (quoted in Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, Chicago, 1999, p. 66).
Back in Paris at this time, Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s ardent friend, supporter, and champion received an appraisal of her works by the artist from his dealer, Kahnweiler. She was at this time parting ways from her brother, Leo, their artistic tastes diverging irreparably. In October, Stein sold three of her most important early Picassos, Acrobate à la boule, 1905 (Zervos, vol. 1, no. 290; The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Nu à la draperie, 1907 (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 47; The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), and Trois femmes, 1908 (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 108; The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), to Kahnweiler for 20,000 francs. As part of this transaction, he gave her one of the artist’s largest recent works, the present Homme à la guitare. The dealer wrote to Stein on 17 October 1913 confirming the purchase, “I have the honor of confirming our conversation of yesterday. You are selling me three of your Picassos, to wit: the young girl standing on the ball, the large composition in pink, and the woman with the linen. For these pictures I am paying you 20,000 francs in cash plus the new Picasso called Homme à la guitare. I enclose herewith, as agreed, a check for 20,000 francs payable 15 January, 1914. I should be grateful if you would let me know that you have received it” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1989, p. 444).
This painting remained in Stein’s legendary collection, hanging in her rue de Fleurus home in Paris, which she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Upon her death in 1946, her estate was left to her nephew, with the stipulation that her art collection would be managed by Toklas. Following Toklas’s death in 1967, Stein’s heirs sold the collection to a syndicate of interested buyers for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized by David Rockefeller. The legendary French-born banker and keen collector of art as well as music scores, André Meyer, acquired Homme à la guitare as part of the syndicate, before gifting it to The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1980.
Over the course of the twelve months prior to his creation of this work, Picasso, together with his friend and cubist comrade, Georges Braque, had made a series of artistic leaps, integrating found objects in cubist collages, pasted paper pieces in their papier collés, and latterly, inventing three-dimensional cubist constructions and assemblages that once again radically redefined the parameters of artmaking. During his stay in Céret in the spring and summer of 1913, Picasso was exploring and experimenting with the artistic repercussions of these breakthroughs, scrutinizing form—both pictorial and material—as he moved effortlessly between painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture, each medium informing his work in the other. Homme à la guitare marks the synthesis of these different developments, as well as occupying a deeply personal place in the life of the artist.
Picasso had arrived in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees in March 1913. On this, his third stay there, he traveled with his partner of the time, Eva Gouel, the enigmatic “ma jolie,” as he referred to her in his painting. In May 1912, his long-term relationship with Fernande Olivier had come to an explosive end when she left him for another artist. Picasso had already been enjoying a clandestine relationship with Eva, who would after this point become the artist’s offical muse and lover. Returning to Céret, Picasso and Eva once again rented the ground floor of the Maison Delcros, and were soon joined by painter and poet, Max Jacob. Happy to be away from Paris and its demands, the artist set to work. “I’m behaving very badly towards all my friends,” Picasso wrote to his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on 11 April 1913. “I’m not writing to anyone, but I’m working; I’m working on projects and I’m not forgetting any one of you” (quoted in Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989, p. 416).
Notably for this sojourn, Braque was not present. In contrast to the previous years during which they were, as Braque later described, tethered together like mountain climbers, at this time he was happily ensconced in Sorgues. Though Picasso missed his company—“it’s really too bad that the telephone at your place doesn’t reach Céret,” he wrote to him (quoted in J. Richardson, op. cit., 2009, p. 276)—tellingly, unlike other trips he did not implore him to come and join him. Their art, which had in the past few years, been almost indistinguishable, was beginning to diverge, the pair no longer responding to the each other with the same sense of immediacy and intensity as previous years.
Upon his arrival in Céret, Picasso began a new series of papier collés, expanding and building upon the possibilities of this art form that Braque had pioneered in the autumn of 1912. Already by this point, the artists had found that Analytical Cubism had reached its natural conclusion. As a result, they began to reintroduce life into their work, gradually relaxing the dense webs of lines and facets that had constructed their hermetic compositions, and reintegrating color once more. Stenciled lettering began to appear, before real objects, pieces of wallpaper and faux-bois, and carefully chosen cuttings of newspapers and ephemera. As a result, Cubism was transformed as reality itself was integrated into the two-dimensional confines of the canvas, thereby opening up new directions in the conception not only of a painting, but of art itself.
This clearer, bolder cubist idiom, constructed with larger, flattened planes would become the defining characteristic of Synthetic Cubism, which Picasso explored at pace throughout 1913. The pieces of paper used to construct the compositions fed into his work in oil paint—as seen in the present work, with its interlocking arrangement of painted planes of deep blue and green, together with luminous red and orange. “The changes in structure make [Picasso’s] paintings look simpler, flatter, clearer, bolder—and also less mysterious or metaphysical,” Elizabeth Cowling has described. “Not that they became unambiguous and direct. Far from it. But the strangeness of shadowy, immeasurable spaces and indeterminate forms and the equivocation of Mallarméen ‘suggestion’ were replaced by witty visual metaphors and puns” (Picasso: Style and Meaning, London, 2002, pp. 262-263).
Here, the figure of the man and the guitar are converted into a union of repeating shapes and signs: the curving silhouette of the guitar is echoed in the faceted shape of the man’s head, these semi-circular forms cascading down to convey the volume of his bust and torso, while the black circle of the instrument’s soundhole finds its equivalent in his head, standing as a single eye. A painted still life occupies the right hand side of the canvas, the famous Bass beer label, an integral cubist symbol, emblazoned over the partially painted outlines of two bottles, which themselves mimic the form of the figure’s distinctive black top hat. These playful visual rhythms and equivalences define Synthetic Cubism.
Picasso turned to his famed motif of the man playing the guitar to explore these latest developments in the spring of 1913. Earlier in the year, Picasso had created a large assemblage of this subject in his studio on the boulevard Raspail in Paris. In this playful—and highly radical work—Picasso set a real tabletop, with a bottle, cup, pipe, and newspaper, in front of a large canvas with a drawn and painted cubist figure of a man holding, with cut out newspaper arms, an actual guitar. A painted and constructed violin can also be seen hanging on the upper right hand side of the canvas. Once arranged, Picasso then photographed his assemblage—memorializing this ephemeral composition in time, as if he had created a living art work on a pictorial stage.
Marrying the real and the represented, the three-dimensional and two-dimensional, this assemblage paved the way for Picasso’s artistic production in Céret. There, Picasso’s evident fascination with the man and guitar as the vehicle through which to play with this concept of transformation from idea to form, figure to object, painting to sculpture, materialized in both his sketchbooks from this period, as well as his papier collés, and the present painting. Over the course of his drawings of this period, the form and structure of the guitar player is broken down and reimagined in myriad ways, built from vertical strips and interlocking planes, or conveyed in some of the more diagrammatic drawings in a squared paper carnet, as possible three-dimensional constructions (see for example Carnet des dessins cubistes, nos. MP1865 (25r) and (46r), Musée national Picasso, Paris). Homme à la guitare stands at the heart of this fascinating preoccupation as Picasso transformed the guitar player construction into oil—the painted conclusion of the idea born in the initial assemblage. Where the forms of the figure had been reimagined as solid, interconnecting parts, here, Picasso reimagined this construction in flat planes of bold color and pattern.
Despite being deeply immersed in these exciting material explorations, Picasso was called home to Barcelona at the end of March 1913 as his father José Ruiz y Blasco had taken ill. A few weeks later, at the beginning of May, he heard news that his father had worsened and rushed to Spain to be with him. He died on 3 May; “You can imagine the state I’m in,” Picasso wrote to Kahnweiler (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1989, p. 417). Later in the month, Picasso’s beloved dog, Frika, passed away, while Eva also fell ill, the start of the illness that would ultimately lead to her untimely death in 1915. “I hope that Pablo will get back to work again,” she wrote to Stein, “as that is the only thing that can make him forget his sorrow a little” (quoted in P. Daix and J. Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907-1916, London, 1979, p. 300).
While there is no overt sign of these bereavements in Picasso’s work of this period, the presence of black planes in a number of his papier collés, as well as the minimal, austere quality of some of them, could be seen to reflect his grief. John Richardson wrote of Homme à la guitare that “the man in a tall Córdoban hat holding a guitar…could well be a memorial to his father... the oddly discordant café still life in half-mourning mauve on the right could refer to don José’s heyday in the cafes of Málaga” (op. cit., 2009, p. 278). In this way, this large and impressive painting is not only a bold example of the artist’s latest pictorial explorations, but can also be seen as a poignant testament to Picasso’s father, himself an artist, who would remain a central presence in his work for the rest of his life. Years later, Picasso told the photographer, Brassaï, “Every time I draw a man, involuntarily I think of my father. For me, man is ‘Don José,’ and that will be true all my life. He wore a beard. All the men I draw have more or less his features” (quoted in Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, Chicago, 1999, p. 66).
Back in Paris at this time, Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s ardent friend, supporter, and champion received an appraisal of her works by the artist from his dealer, Kahnweiler. She was at this time parting ways from her brother, Leo, their artistic tastes diverging irreparably. In October, Stein sold three of her most important early Picassos, Acrobate à la boule, 1905 (Zervos, vol. 1, no. 290; The Pushkin Museum, Moscow), Nu à la draperie, 1907 (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 47; The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), and Trois femmes, 1908 (Zervos, vol. 2a, no. 108; The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg), to Kahnweiler for 20,000 francs. As part of this transaction, he gave her one of the artist’s largest recent works, the present Homme à la guitare. The dealer wrote to Stein on 17 October 1913 confirming the purchase, “I have the honor of confirming our conversation of yesterday. You are selling me three of your Picassos, to wit: the young girl standing on the ball, the large composition in pink, and the woman with the linen. For these pictures I am paying you 20,000 francs in cash plus the new Picasso called Homme à la guitare. I enclose herewith, as agreed, a check for 20,000 francs payable 15 January, 1914. I should be grateful if you would let me know that you have received it” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1989, p. 444).
This painting remained in Stein’s legendary collection, hanging in her rue de Fleurus home in Paris, which she shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Upon her death in 1946, her estate was left to her nephew, with the stipulation that her art collection would be managed by Toklas. Following Toklas’s death in 1967, Stein’s heirs sold the collection to a syndicate of interested buyers for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized by David Rockefeller. The legendary French-born banker and keen collector of art as well as music scores, André Meyer, acquired Homme à la guitare as part of the syndicate, before gifting it to The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1980.
