Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through June 6

The guitar is incidental, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Disguised as a thematic romp, MoMA’s “subtly buzzing manifesto of an exhibition” in fact proposes that some of “the most challenging questions” raised by 20th-century art can be traced to 1912–14, when Pablo Picasso struck a death blow to a fundamental premise: namely, that works of art should reflect life. Prodded by his ally Georges Braque, Picasso was playing with collage and paperboard sculpture as he sought an art that would constitute “a world of its own,” one that made “no effort to refer to any outside reality for validation.” In a “particularly snazzy” 1913 collage called Guitar, the goal is achieved: “Pictorial realism, with its artificial mirroring of nature, is absent,” as Picasso for the first time refrained from painting a single detail. “What’s left is cubist realness: stuff glued to other funky stuff,” various realities sharing space.

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If art for centuries had been about tricking the eye, Picasso sought to “fool the mind,” said Eric Gibson in The Wall Street Journal. Nowhere is this maxim expressed more powerfully than in the work that inspired the exhibition, Still Life With ‘Guitar’ (1913), a cardboard guitar sitting on a rounded cardboard “tabletop.” Donated to MoMA after the artist’s death, the sculpture was previously displayed only once—without the tabletop component. But in 2005, a scholar studying an early photograph of the work pointed out the discrepancy, and the importance of its sudden reappearance can’t be overstated. The tabletop “shifts the guitar from being part of our shared space into a quasi-fictive realm, as if it and the guitar were elements in a painted still life.” This “fusion of multiple levels of reality,” including fictive reality, may be the single most “liberating transformation” that Picasso ever effected upon art.