In this still life composition Picasso used newspaper as ground upon which to draw, as material with which to render a seltzer bottle, and as newspaper itself. The diagonally positioned word JOURNAL (with its J carefully cut from the masthead of the French newspaper Le Journal) and the unequally sized f-holes inscribed on the body of the violin are summary indications of recessive space; the simple B-curves of delicately hand-painted faux bois paper suggest the varnished wood of the violin. Works such as Siphon, Glass, Newspaper, and Violin were greatly admired and frequently collected by writers and artists associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. For Dadaist writer and artist Tristan Tzara, the newspaper both complicated and enhanced the work, which he owned for many years: "A form cut out of a newspaper and integrated into a drawing or painting encloses the commonplace, the scrap of daily, ordinary reality in relation to the reality constructed by the mind."
