A symphonic array of form and pigment, Picasso’s Guitare sur une table from 1919 epitomizes the artist’s bold stylistic evolution in the years following the First World War. Drawing on the Cubist idiom pioneered alongside Braque beginning around 1907-08, Picasso’s still lifes from the subsequent decade reveal a heightened liveliness and levity paired with a dynamic and newfound appreciation of color.

The intertwined artistic dialogue between Braque and Picasso in the late 1900s and early 1910s spurred on the development of an entirely new visual mode. Their single-minded focus on the dissection and representation of a three-dimensional form in an inherently two-dimensional medium forever transformed the tapestry of Modern art. Later termed Analytical Cubism, the style of the resultant compositions centered around the fragmentary examination of an object as seen through multiple, concurrent and overlapping viewpoints (see Fig. 1). The palettes of Braque and Picasso during this time were characteristically muted so as not to distract from the formal structure of the composition. Over the course of the following decade, however, such planar compositions would be liberated from the highly systematic crystallized panes of grey and brown as Picasso and his fellow Cubists moved into a new phase of Synthetic Cubism. Defined by its increasingly eradicated sense of depth and inclusion of mixed media, this phase beginning in the early 1910s also brought with it an expanded use of color (see Fig. 2).

By the summer of 1914, however, Picasso had parted with his Cubist colleagues Braque and Derain, who as French nationals had left for their military service, thus effectively ending the close collaboration that had so deeply influenced the movement. For Picasso, the ensuing war years would be spent enmeshed in a very different milieu as he traveled between Paris, Italy and Spain for his latest project with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. As a set and costume designer for Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau’s Parade—a ballet centered around a traveling circus troupe—Picasso’s projects channeled both the Cubist abstractions of his most recent work as well as the Saltimbanques of his earlier Rose Period.

The dichotomy of styles which first arose in his Ballet Russes collaborations would carry on into his post-World War I paintings, giving rise to a renewed, more playful era of Cubism as well as a period of delicate Neo-Classical works. His simultaneous mastery of such radically different styles, each in its way a sort of rappel à l'ordre, starkly divided his audiences. Picasso, however, was unfazed by such critiques, viewing his stylistic variations as an ongoing investigation of different idioms.

Such a modern dialogue, which benefited from the progress of the moment and the lessons of the past, found its material resolution in the parallel and often intersecting tracks of these two modalities. As seen in the pair of portraits featuring Picasso’s wife Olga painted from 1917 (see Figs. 3-4), as well as the 1919 still lifes in front of a window (see Figs. 5-6). Picasso seamlessly glides from one style to the next, using a core subject like the figure or the guitar as a means for formal exploration.

Enlivened post-war compositions like Guitare sur une table recall the artist’s favored motifs from his earlier still lifes, the musical instruments, fruit bowls and bottles of the prior decade reimagined in planes of abundant color with trompe l’oeil patterns standing in for his earlier papiers collés. In the present work, space is compressed in two-dimensional expanses of color, juxtaposed as if sheets of cut-and-pasted paper. Set against a dramatic halo at center, the guitar comes to the fore, constructed with pink, blue, brown and red, while the teal table upon which it rests is echoed by the expansive blue sky in the intersecting window. As in the classicized version of Nature morte devant une fenêtre à Saint-Raphaël, the sunlit windowpane and foreground are illuminated in matching pale colors, here in a striated yellow. Of this period in Picasso’s career, art historian Jean Sutherland Boggs writes, "He was never more inventive […] more cheerful, more delighted with color and pattern.” With their enriched and liberated palettes, the post-war still lifes amounted to a pronouncement of "cubism enjoyed" (Exh. Cat., The Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso & Things, 1992, p. 152).

The inspiration for this particular scene, that of the still life in front of an open window, was born out of a holiday on the Côte d'Azur. After spending much of 1919 in London with the Ballet Russes, Picasso and his new wife Olga Khokhlova (a ballerina from the company) returned to Paris, traveling thereafter to the small southern town of Saint-Raphaël. Situated in their elegant suite overlooking the Mediterranean, Picasso soon alighted on his newest subject—the still life au guéridon. The resultant paintings and works on paper offered variations on the still life, most notably those with a guitar placed upon a table in front of a balcony. While many of the related compositions (primarily small gouaches) feature more literal interpretations of their subjects, the present work, painted after Picasso's return to Paris, abstracts the scene’s key components in an imaginative new iteration of Synthetic Cubism.

While the now-iconic motif of the guitar appeared at the fore of his work as early as 1903, it was the artist’s Cubist period which first transformed this everyday object into a fundamental mechanism within the evolution of Modern art. Linked to his Spanish ancestry and imbued with an inherent sensuality—its complex figuration offering a variety of suggestive curves and recesses—the guitar proved a versatile subject for Picasso’s interpretations from his Blue Period to the end of his impressive career. As Robert Rosenblum writes, "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... The anthropomorphic potential of the guitar... recommended it especially to a quick-change magician who could sometimes recreate it as a female nude… or as a more stiffly geometric male presence that might even be another of Picasso's alter egos” (Johnathan Brown, ed., Picasso and the Spanish Tradition, New Haven, 1996, pp. 78-79).

From the inimitable collection of William S. Paley, Picasso's Guitare sur une table projects the same gusto for life and one's surroundings for which Paley himself was known. The arrival of this iconic masterpiece on the market coincides with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s radical re-exploration of Cubist representation in the fall 2022 exhibition, Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition.