Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914

Pablo Picasso's modest yet radical cardboard and sheet metal Guitar sculptures—made in 1912 and 1914, respectively—bracket an incandescent period of structural, spatial, and material experimentation in the artist's long career. While in what he described as “the process of imagining a guitar,” Picasso embraced techniques of assemblage, collage, construction, and mixed-medium painting, combining traditional art supplies—oil paint, charcoal, pastel, ink—with what were then unconventional materials, including cardboard, sand, newspaper, wallpaper, and sheet music. This book situates Picasso's Guitars within the constellation of objects that surrounded them in his studio, affording fresh insight into his Cubist work in the years immediately before World War I. An essay by Anne Umland, Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum, uses photographs, correspondence, archival records, and eyewitness accounts to explore Picasso's practice and the remarkable institutional history of the two Guitar sculptures, gifts to MoMA from the artist.