Two rooms, two phases of the same undertaking
Art historians traditionally distinguish two moments in Picasso and Braque's Cubism. Analytic Cubism, up to around 1912, pushes the decomposition of volumes to near-abstraction: the palette narrows to ochres and greys, objects scatter into facets the eye struggles to reassemble. Synthetic Cubism, from 1912 onward, reverses the movement: colour and texture return, forms simplify rather than fragment, and new materials — paper, string, oilcloth — make an entrance that has nothing figurative about it.
Room 4 shows mainly the first phase, Room 5 the second. Between the two lies a single summer, that of 1912, when Picasso invented what art history records as the first collage.
1. Room 4 — the guitar, all the way to dissolution
Man with a Guitar and Man with a Mandolin, painted in autumn 1911, belong to the moment when Picasso's Cubism reaches its most extreme degree of fragmentation: the figure is no more than a network of overlapping planes, in an almost monochrome palette of browns and greys, where only a title — or a detail that stays legible, a tuft of strings, a section of moustache — still lets the canvas hook back onto a recognisable subject.
The guitar is not an incidental choice. Picasso and Braque return endlessly, at this period, to the same simple objects — guitar, glass, newspaper, pipe — drawn from a repertoire of still life and café rather than grand history painting. The motif returns again in 1913 in Guitar, where Picasso pushes his exploration of the instrument even further; the following year it becomes the subject of his first sculptures in cardboard and cut sheet metal — a shift from painting to constructed object that the guitar, among all Cubist forms, seems to have particularly inspired in him.
2. Room 5 — the caned chair, or the real entering the painting
Still Life with Chair Caning, painted in Paris in spring 1912, is a small oval painting measuring 27 by 35 centimetres — and a major rupture. Picasso glues onto it a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern, then frames the whole composition with an actual piece of rope in place of a frame. This gesture — introducing into the painting an object that is not painted but really there — has gone down in art history as the first collage, to be distinguished from the papier collé that Braque invented a few months later, in summer 1912, this time gluing wallpaper imitating wood grain rather than a found object.
The work was born during a period when Picasso and Braque worked in such close collaboration that they sometimes refrained, Braque would say decades later, from signing certain canvases — "we were a bit like mountain climbers roped together," he would sum it up. This closeness, a daily affair since 1908, only came to an end in autumn 1914: mobilised at the outbreak of the First World War, Braque left for the front, and the two men would never regain the same working intimacy.
3. Room 5 — summer 1914, three glasses and a pipe before the war
Glass, Glass and Packet of Tobacco and Glass, Packet of Tobacco and Ace of Clubs, three small canvases painted during the summer of 1914, show Synthetic Cubism at its most economical: a few simple forms, flat honest colours, a stippled pattern imitating the grain of wood or paper. The Painter and His Model, painted the same season, reintroduces the human figure into this same, already near-abstract vocabulary.
These canvases are among the last Picasso painted before the war scattered the small group that had carried the movement — besides Braque, several of Picasso's German dealer and artist friends had to leave France as enemy nationals. Cubism did not stop dead in summer 1914, but it changed face: Picasso would continue alone, or with other accomplices, down the path that these modestly sized still lifes provisionally close off here.
How much time
The two rooms are visited one after the other; the Chair Caning deserves more time than the other canvases, since the detail of the rope and the oilcloth is easy to miss without stepping closer.
- Room 4 — Man with a Guitar and Man with a Mandolin — 8 minutes.
- Room 5 — Still Life with Chair Caning — 6 minutes, stepping closer to see the rope and the oilcloth.
- Room 4 — Guitar (1913) — 3 minutes.
- Room 5 — the three Glasses and The Painter and His Model — 8 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against the Musée Picasso Paris, MoMA, and cross-checked sources (Wikipedia FR/EN, Centre Pompidou) for dates, techniques and provenance.
- Wikipedia FR — Nature morte à la chaise cannée
- Musée Picasso Paris — Artwork sheet, Nature morte à la chaise cannée (PDF)
- Encyclopédie Universalis — Nature morte à la chaise cannée
- Wikiquote EN — Georges Braque
- Wikipedia EN — Georges Braque
- MoMA — Georges Braque, Man with a Guitar
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Musée Picasso website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
