Pablo Picasso

Stephen Hahn Gallery, New York
E.V. Thaw, New York
B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago
Private Collection, Paris
Private Collection, London

Good condition. Laid down; staining visible along edges (particularly along left edge.) A small dot of foxing (or possibly pin hole) upper center edge; sheet may be slightly time darkened overall. There is some cracking in the white pigment, and some tiny pin dots of loss in black pigment in lower left quadrant and in brown pigment, particularly in lower right quadrant.
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During the first half of the nineteen-twenties, Picasso painted in different perspectival manners simultaneously producing volumetric figure studies and dimensionally flattened still lifes. He maintained his previous Cubist explorations while venturing into a style influenced by Neo-Classical tenets. The present work belongs to a series executed in 1920 that incorporates the table and guitar as a pictorial motif. In Nature morte à la guitare Picasso has reduced the forms of the table and the instrument to black silhouettes outlined against flat planes of brown, white, blue and black. The effect of transparency is heightened by the way in which the brown of the paper is allowed to appear through the color planes.

Discussing Picasso's work from this period, John Richardson suggests that "the development of this last great period of Synthetic Cubism can easily be followed through the Guéridons - still lifes on a pedestal table... which are a recurrent feature... No longer did Picasso feel obligated to investigate the intricate formal and spatial problems that preoccupied him ten years before. Instead he felt free to relax and exploit his cubist discoveries in a decorative manner that delights the eye... Never again did the artist's style recapture the air of magisterial calm that is such a feature of this last great phase of Cubism" (John Richardson, Picasso, An American Tribute, New York, 1962, p. 52).