In photographs "I see my paintings differently from how they are," Picasso said. For this picture, taken at the end of a summer spent in the French village of Sorgues, he arranged six canvases around the entryway to his rented villa. The compositional clarity of the two oval Guitar paintings stands out in relation to the other canvases, which are more typical of the artist's Analytic Cubist style since 1910. Picasso regularly staged and photographed arrangements of in-progress and recently completed work. The inclusion of several objects in a single shot spared him the time and expense of making individual prints and, more significantly, made it easy to judge multiple works in relation to one another.
