Picasso did not publicly exhibit his pre–World War I musical instrument works until the late 1960s, but photographs of these assemblages were published shortly after their creation in the avant-garde journal Les Soirées de Paris, which was coedited by French art critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the artist's close friend. Surrealist André Breton recollected in 1961 how revolutionary these works had seemed to him, even in black-and-white reproductions, and how radical they remained even decades later:

I rediscover my youthful vision when I call to mind my first encounter with Picasso's work, at second hand, through an issue of Apollinaire's Soirées de Paris which included rather hazy reproductions of five of his latest still lifes (the date was 1913). . . . I gather, from what Picasso said to me one day, that these early constructions have long since been dismembered, but the image that remains of them suffices to demonstrate to what a degree they anticipate those forms of expression today which are most convinced of their own daring.

Open to repositioning and repurposing, three works reproduced in the journal now exist in partial or altered form. An oil painting and a lost wood construction rounded out the set of five images included in the journal.