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In the Guitars series by Pablo Picasso, one of the creators of cubism, the transition from analytical cubism to synthetic cubism is observed. Picasso developed this series between 1912 and 1914 and his exhibition of the works that comprise it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011 offered the possibility of accessing a better understanding of an artistic movement of special significance.
synthetic cubism
Cubism is a disruptive artistic movement of the Renaissance aesthetic parameters still in force at the beginning of the 20th century. In painting it is expressed in the composition with geometric shapes of images of nature, while in poetry it is translated into verses with optional rhyme, without defined metrics, with images of the subject being addressed; Guillaume Apollinaire was the poet who best represented him.
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso developed cubism in the visual arts from 1907. Conventional perspective disappears in their works and multiple perspectives are observed in the geometric shapes that make up the images, as well as various simultaneous planes of the same object. We can observe a face from the front and in profile at the same time, and objects are often represented only by some characteristic component. The colors go through muted shades of gray, green and brown, and later in the development of the movement, various objects are incorporated on the canvas, forming collages .
Cubism went through two periods. The first was called analytical cubism: emphasis was placed on geometric representations and multiple perspectives, and color was relativized. In some works it can be difficult to identify the figures and it looks like abstract art, so it was also called hermetic cubism. From 1912 synthetic cubism developed, in which collages began to be made incorporating pieces of newspapers, wallpapers and other materials in the paintings. Color regained a more relevant role and the works became simpler and easier to understand.
Picasso’s Guitars exhibition in New York
From February 13 to June 6, 2011, he developed an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Picasso Guitars; 1912 – 1914 ( Picasso’s guitars: 1912 – 1914 ). In this event, 85 works by Pablo Picasso were exhibited, collected from 35 public and private collections, in which guitars are represented in collages , drawings, paintings and sculptures. The artistic exhibition covered the period between the first plastic work in the series, which represents a guitar made of cardboard and strings made in 1912 (figure below), and the last, made with a sheet of metal in 1914.
Anne Umland and Blair Hartzell organized this exhibition. At the opening of this exhibition, Umland declared that it was the first exhibition showing Picasso’s guitar construction, putting them in the context of a great period of experimentation by the artist from Malaga.
The 1912 cardboard guitar motif (figure below) is simple, but the creation was unlike any artwork that had come before; two years later, Picasso recreated it with a sheet of metal. The metal of the second guitar, thin and flat, was common in Paris as a roofing material, and may have been gray or black before becoming the rusty metal that the sculpture featured in the exhibition.
The importance of the Guitars series
Most art historians characterize Pablo Picasso’s Guitars series as the definitive transition from Analytical Cubism to Synthetic Cubism. However, the guitars had a deeper meaning. If all the collages and representations are carefully analyzed , it is clear that the Guitars series , which also includes violins, crystallized the meaning of Picasso’s cubism. The series establishes a repertoire of symbols that continued in the artist’s visual vocabulary through the Parade sketches of 1917, as well as in the Cubo-Surrealist works of the 1920s.
It is not known exactly when the Guitarras series began . The collages include newspaper snippets dated November and December 1912. Black-and-white photographs of Picasso’s studio on Boulevard Raspail, published in Les Soirées de Paris No. 18 (November 1913), show the cream-colored cardboard guitar under construction, surrounded by numerous collages and drawings of guitars and violins mounted side by side on one wall.
Picasso gave his 1914 metal guitar to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1971. At the time, the director of the section of paintings and drawings, William Rubin, believed that the model cardboard guitar (figure above) had been made from early 1912. The museum acquired the model in 1973 after Picasso’s death and in accordance with the artist’s wishes.
During the preparation of the huge exhibition Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism in 1989, William Rubin changed the construction date of the model, assigning it to October 1912, a date with which the art historian Ruth Marcus agrees. The date that appears on the piece, the model, which is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reads October to December 1912.
A better approach to the meaning of Pablo Picasso’s guitars can be had through the record of the art critic André Salmon.
I have seen what no man has seen before in Picasso’s studio (…). Spookier than Faust’s laboratory, this study (which some people might claim was artless in the conventional sense of the term) was stocked with the latest artifacts. All the forms that surrounded me seemed completely new to me (…) .
Some visitors to the studio, surprised by the things they saw covering the walls, refused to call these objects paintings; they were made of oil-painted cloth, packing paper, and scraps of newspaper. Visitors pointed to the object of Picasso’s witty glimmers and said, “What is it? Do you put it on a pedestal? Do you hang it on a wall? Is it painting or is it sculpture?» Picasso, dressed in the blue suit of a Parisian worker, replied in his best Andalusian voice: «It’s nothing. It’s the guitar!” And that was it! The watertight compartments of art collapsed. He freed us from painting and sculpture, just as he had freed us from the idiotic tyranny of academic genres. It is no longer this or that. It’s no big deal. It’s the guitar!
André Salmon, spring of 1914.
The meaning of the Guitars series
There are two aspects that stand out in Pablo Picasso’s Guitars series : the wide variety of materials and techniques and, also, the repetition of forms with different meanings according to the context in which they are included. the collagesthey incorporate everyday and very dissimilar elements, such as wallpaper, sand, brooches, ropes, labels, wrappers, musical scores and pieces of newspapers; the images of the same objects are drawn or painted by the artist. The combination of these elements broke with the traditional practices of two-dimensional art, not only in terms of incorporating humble materials but also because these materials alluded to common life, on the streets, in studios and in bars. This interplay of elements of the real world is reflected in the integration of the imaginary of contemporary everyday life into the avant-garde poetry of his friends, or what Guillaume Apollinaire called la nouveauté poésie (poetry of novelty), which was an early form of Pop art. .
Another way of understanding the meaning of the Guitars series is to investigate the repertoire of shapes that appear in most of Picasso’s works. The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York gives the opportunity to have references and contexts of the works. The collages and guitar models, seen together, seem to reveal the artist’s internal conflict, with his criteria and his ambitions. Various symbols are distinguished to indicate the objects or parts of the body that migrate from one context to another, reinforcing and changing meanings only having the same context as a guide.
An example is the curvilinear side of a guitar, which in one work resembles the curve of a man’s ear along what would be the shape of his head, while in another it is prolonged. In one part of the collage , a circle may indicate the sound of a guitar or the representation of the mouth of the instrument; elsewhere, it can also represent the bottom of a bottle. A circle can be the top of the bottle’s cork and at the same time resemble a top hat carefully placed on the face of a muscular gentleman.
Knowing this repertoire of shapes helps us to understand the synecdoche of cubism, those little shapes that indicate what the artist wants to convey: here is a violin, here is a table, here is a glass, and here is a human being. This repertoire of symbols that developed during Analytical Cubism was simplified in new ways in the Synthetic Cubism period.
The meaning of cubism in the Guitars series
Guitar models such as the cardboard one from 1912 and the sheet metal one from 1914 clearly show the formal aspects of Cubism. As Jack Flam wrote in Cubicuo , a better term for cubism would have been “planarism,” since artists described reality in terms of the different faces or planes of an object: its front, its back, its top, its bottom, the sides; all his pieces were represented on a surface simultaneously. Pablo Picasso explained the meaning of the construction of the collages to the sculptor Julio Gonzales:
It would have been enough to cut them – colors, after all, are nothing more than indications of differences in perspective, of inclined planes in one way or another – and then assemble them according to the indications given by the colour, to then face them as one» sculpture .”
The construction of the guitar models occurred while Picasso was working on the collages. Surface-mounted plans became projected planes emerging from the wall in a three-dimensional arrangement unfolded in space. Picasso’s art representative at the time, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, maintained that the construction of the guitars was based on the Grebo masks (carved masks of African art) that Picasso had acquired in August 1912. These three-dimensional objects represent the eyes. as cylinders projecting from the flat surface of the mask; In Picasso’s 1912 cardboard guitar model (previous figure) you can see the representation of the sound that emerges from the mouth of the instrument as a cylinder that projects from the body of the guitar.
Another element that has been deduced from the analysis of his works is Pablo Picasso’s record of contemporary toys, as André Salmon argues in La jeune sculpture français : a small tin fish suspended from a circle of tin tape represented the fish swimming in his fishbowl.
The sculpture and the series Guitars
The construction of Pablo Picasso’s guitar models broke with the structure of conventional sculpture. Already in his Head of a Woman (Fernande) , a work from 1909, a series of contiguous planes full of cracks and roughness represent the hair and face of the woman Picasso loved at that time, Fernande Olivier. These planes are placed in such a way as to maximize the reflection of light off certain surfaces, similar to the light-illuminated planes in cubist paintings of the analytical period. These illuminated surfaces become colored surfaces in the collages .
The construction of the cardboard guitar model is based on the structuring of plans. It is composed of only 8 parts (see previous figure): the simultaneous front and back of the guitar, a box for its body, the sound hole, the neck (which curves upwards like an elongated channel), a triangle that points down to indicate the head of the guitar and a short paper folded near the triangle threaded with guitar strings. The common strings placed vertically represent the guitar strings and laterally (in a comically dropped fashion) represent the guitar frets. A semicircular piece, attached to the lower part of the model, represents the site of a table for the guitar.
The cardboard guitar model and the sheet metal guitar model seem to simultaneously represent the interior and exterior of the instrument.
Sources
Picasso’s guitars – RT , 2011.
MoMA exhibition explores Picasso’s guitar sculptures and his experimental practice from 1912 to 1914 | New York | 1F MEDIA PROJECT .
Penrose, Roland. The Life and Work of Picasso . Third edition, 1981.
Ramirez Dominguez, Juan Antonio. cubism . In Art History , Anaya Editions, Madrid, 1986.
