Picasso drew a diagrammatic charcoal structure then pasted onto it seven fragments clipped from three days' worth of the newspaper Le Journal, some of which he then drew on top of. French Surrealist poet Louis Aragon characterized the limited array of commonplace papers Picasso used in works such as Man with a Hat and a Violin as "an extreme and arrogant poverty of materials"—although the compound support is constructed of two sheets of high-grade artist's paper glued end to end. Sheets of the same artist's paper appear in many works in this exhibition; they provided Picasso with a standard-size support that could be variously oriented, used individually, halved, or, as here, doubled up to create his largest newspaper papier collé of these years. The top-hatted man and the violin he grasps appear separately in other compositions Picasso executed around the same time.
