MoMA Presents PICASSO: GUITARS 1912-1914

The exhibition Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 takes as its point of departure two works given to The Museum of Modern Art by Pablo Picasso in the early 1970s: Guitar, assembled from cardboard, paper, wire, glue, and string in 1912, and a second version made of sheet metal in 1914.

Unexpectedly humble in subject and unprecedented in mode of execution, the two Guitar constructions resembled no artwork ever seen before. Within Picasso's long career they bracket a remarkably brief yet intensely generative period of material and structural experimentation. The exhibition, on view from February 13 through June 6, 2011, brings together some 65 closely related collages, constructions, drawings, paintings, and photographs from over 35 public and private collections worldwide.

Several works on loan to the exhibition will be on view for the very first time in the United States, chief among them Violin Hanging on the Wall (1912-13), from the Kunstmuseum Bern, and Guitar, Gas Jet, and Bottle (1913), from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. MoMA is the exhibition's only venue. Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 is organized by Anne Umland, Curator, with Blair Hartzell, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

Early photographs of Picasso's studio indicate that he displayed his cardboard Guitar construction in at least two ways: as an independent object and as part of a larger still life assemblage that also included paper and wood (all the elements of which were long and erroneously presumed lost). Picasso had in fact elected to save only Guitar and the curved "tabletop" he had created to go beneath it, when he disassembled this still life. He packed these two selected components away together, most likely in autumn 1916, and subsequently left both pieces to the Museum upon his death. In 2005 a query from art historian Christine Poggi prompted the rediscovery of the tabletop in MoMA's storage. Reuniting the tabletop with the Guitar for the first time since Picasso packed them away together almost a century ago prompts reconsideration of the distinct yet interrelated histories of two of his most iconic works. The cardboard Guitar's variable modes of installation are characteristic of Picasso's combinatory process during the two years that separate its creation in 1912 from its reiteration in sheet metal in 1914. Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 is the first time that the cardboard Guitar is publicly exhibited with this distinctive element.

Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914
February 13-June 6, 2011
Special Exhibitions Gallery, Third Floor