Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein, Paris
Nelson Rockefeller, New York
Berggruen Gallery
Marlborough Gallery, Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the mid-1970s

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Four Americans in Paris: The Collection of Gertrude Stein and Her Family, 1970, no. 53 (as dating from 1912-13)

Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Le Cubisme de Picasso, Neuchâtel, 1979, mentioned p. 286
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso Cubism 1907-1917, New York, 1990, mentioned p. 291
Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (exhibition catalogue), Musée Picasso, Paris; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fotomuseum of the Munich Stadtmuseum, 1997-98, fig. 131 (II), the present work illustrated in  a photograph of a wall arrangement of papiers collés in the boulevard Raspail Studio in Paris, winter 1912

In the fall of 1912, Picasso executed a number of works on the theme of guitar and violin, experimenting with a wide variety of media – from line drawings, like the present work, through collages, sculptures and oil and sand paintings on canvas. The present work is closest to a papier collé of the same title, which is an almost identical charcoal drawing, to which Picasso has added a piece of pasted paper (Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, op. cit., no. 508), and according to Pierre Daix it is a study for Picasso's painting in oil, sand and charcoal, of the same title and date, that was also originally in the possession of Gertrude Stein, and is now at the Dartmouth College Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire (C. Zervos, vol. 2**, no. 373). This wide range of materials with which he experimented at the time testifies to Picasso’s extraordinary artistic vision; they are all manifestations of a unique course of tireless innovation resulting in a body of work that truly revolutionized twentieth-century art.

 

The present work is visible in a photograph of Picasso’s studio (see fig. 1), taken by the artist himself, in a group of drawings, papers collés and several cut-out guitars, some resting on a flat surface, others hanging on the wall. This entire assemblage illustrates the remarkable inventiveness with which Picasso’s mind raced back and forth between different mediums and materials. In a photograph taken by Man Ray in 1922, Guitare sur une table is seen hanging in Gertrude and Leo Stein’s studio in Paris; in 1970 it featured in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition of the collection of Gertrude Stein’s family, which included works by artists such as Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Gris, many of which have since been established as landmarks of modern art.

Fig. 1, Pablo Picasso, Photograph of Picasso's studio at 242 boulevard Raspail, Paris, November-December 1912, showing the present work (lower right), Picasso Archives, Museé Picasso, Paris