Picasso Guitars 1912–1914

On a picture he pastes pieces of "marbled" paper and rectangles of an "imitation wood" panel and substitutes newspaper clippings—absolute planes—for penciled lettering on white, sometimes joining them with a few lines of charcoal or chalk. He puts different household trash—pieces of boxes, ink bottles, visiting cards, pieces of cardboard, rules, violin fragments—on wooden panels, ties them all together with string, impales them on nails, and hangs it on the wall; sometimes he calls in a photographer.

Picasso and Environs
1917

At times Picasso has renounced ordinary paints to compose relief pictures made of cardboard, or papiers collés; he was guided by a plastic inspiration, and these strange, coarse, and mismatched materials were ennobled because the artist endowed them with his own delicate and strong personality.

"Modern Painting"
Der Sturm
February 20, 1913

His studio was wonderful... large and very light, and has a small room opening out of it with a wonderful view over a great cemetery and an enormous space. The whole studio seemed to be bristling with Picassos. All the bits of wood and frames had become like his pictures. Some of the newest ones are very lovely I thought. One gets hardly any idea of them from the photographs, which often don't show what is picture and what isn't. They are amazing arrangements of coloured papers and bits of wood which somehow do give me great satisfaction. He wants to carry them out in iron. Roger recommended aluminum, which rather took his fancy. Of course the present things are not at all permanent.

Letter to Duncan Grant
London, winter 1914

(Small structures in cardboard, wood, zinc, glass, string, etc., tacked, sown [sic] or stuck together is what Picasso has last shown as his.)... They do not seem to possess the necessary physical stamina to survive. You feel the glue will come unstuck and that you would only have to blow with your mouth to shatter them.

"Relativism and Picasso's Latest Work"
Blast
June 20, 1914

I have seen what no man has seen before. When Pablo Picasso, leaving aside painting for a moment, was constructing this immense guitar out of sheet metal whose plans could be dispatched to any ignoramus in the universe who could put it together as well as him, I saw Picasso's studio, and this studio, more incredible than Faust's laboratory, this studio which, according to some, contained no works of art, in the old sense, was furnished with the newest of objects... Some witnesses, already shocked by the things that they saw covering the walls, and that they refused to call paintings because they were made of oilcloth, wrapping paper, and newspaper, said, pointing a haughty finger at the object of Picasso's clever pains: "What is it? Does it rest on a pedestal? Does it hang on a wall? What is it, painting or sculpture?" Picasso, dressed in the blue of Parisian artisans, responded in his finest Andalusian voice: "It's nothing, it's el guitare!" And there you are! The watertight compartments are demolished. We are delivered from painting and sculpture, which already have been liberated from the idiotic tyranny of genres. It is neither this nor that. It is nothing. It's el guitare!

New French Painting
August 9, 1919

In the corner were black idols from the Congo and masks from Dahomey; on the table, a nature morte of bottles, scraps of wallpaper, and newspapers; on the walls, strange models of musical instruments that Picasso himself had cut from cardboard...

"S.I. Shchukin's French Collection"
Apollon
1914

It's a pity, in effect, that he used the guitar as the stepping-off point. It might have been easier for people to understand, I think, if he had used a dot, or he had used a square. The nude was a different story for Picasso but this isn’t about nudes. This is about taking some subject that was dear to him—and a dot can be dear to you—and not running with it, but presenting it to the world in a way that it existed in a different manner...

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
March 1, 2011

It is interesting to think that Picasso, having his Andalusian roots, would automatically decide to attack the guitar as a subject for his work...It was a three-dimensional object to begin with but it's been reconstructed as another three-dimensional object, having gone through a transformative process. It would make perfect sense that he would want to even draw from this. Perhaps he made this and did drawings from it in order to see where the shadows fall...

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
March 8, 2011

"I have the feeling that they were utilitarian for him, that they served to let him make drawings. It’s interesting that he wanted to make them—to enable himself to make paintings and drawings of this kind of space—that he needed a three-dimensional model to make drawings of an abstract space that he was making in a graphic way..."

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
March 1, 2011

"Picasso's Guitar really establishes a whole new paradigm for how sculpture can be made... One of the things that strikes me is that Picasso has given us this Guitar as if it were already seen in pictorial perspective, which might seem like a funny thing to do with an already 3-D object..."

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
March 8, 2011

"Picasso was a great joker. He had an immense sense of humor. That sense of playfulness—the head that can be a guitar, the body that can be a guitar, the man or woman that can turn into a guitar—that seems to me to be full of a kind of joking, wit, and punning, which is very sophisticated but is also the kind of thing that children love."

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
April 6, 2011