| Artist: | Picasso, Pablo |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Guitar, Sheet Music, and Wine Glass | |
| Date of Work: | 1912 | |
| Nationality: | Spanish | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | Pic: Synthetic Cubism (1912-1921) | |
| Medium: | Collage | |
| Subject: subject matter is re-introduced when Picasso shifts from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism in 1911-12 by turning to "collage." Here he incorporates actual fragments of external reality into the picture, using real wallpaper, an actual fragment of sheet music, and a ripped out portion of a page from the newspaper. Along with these bits of the "real," he includes a drawing of a flattened, cubist glass seen from multiple persepctives, some large facets or planes, and a simulation of wood grain paper to signify the wood guitar. The picture becomes a combination of styles or codes, from the abstract to the representational. No code or style has more truth-value than any other; they are all part of the languages of art. He synthesizes plural styles to build a new pictorial reality, rather than a reality completely dependent on nature as its model. Synthetic Cubism is once again, thus, a reality relative to shifting frames of reference. Style: Picasso combines fragments of the "real" with cubist, abstracted fragments, and word fragments: "Jou," which says nothing in itself, but which is a fragment of various words with multiple meanings--"jour" (day); "journal" (newspaper); "jou-jou" (child's play toy). Taking these multiple fragments, he builds up a new synthesis that is pluralistic rather than one-dimensional. He uses "collage" (which means two people living together out of wedlock in French slang) to keep us questioning reality (and art's reality) by continually shifting our frame of reference. He, thus, keeps us "reading" passages between reality and abstraction rather than pushing Cubism all the way in one direction to non-objectivity. Context: "collage" is the turning point between Analytic and Synthetic Cubism (1911-12) in which subject matter is re-introduced through actual fragments of the "real." Color is also re-introduced in the process, and individual differences between Picasso and Braque start to show up in ways they did not during the Analytic Cubist period. If Analytical Cubism is basically "de-constructive," then Synthetic Cubism is "re-constructive." | ||
