1920 Nature morte, musique Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Period of creation: 1919-1930

The composition presents a still life arrangement, seemingly centered around a musical instrument – likely a guitar – rendered in a fractured and abstracted style. The artist has dismantled recognizable forms into geometric planes, employing a limited palette of blues, browns, whites, blacks, and grays. These colors are not used to mimic natural hues but rather to construct an intellectual representation of the subject matter.
The background is a muted gray-blue, providing a relatively uniform field against which the fragmented shapes stand out. The edges of the composition appear somewhat irregular, suggesting either intentional cropping or the effects of aging and wear on the support material. This contributes to a sense of immediacy and perhaps even fragility.
Here we see the instrument’s body broken down into overlapping triangles and trapezoids, with the neck extending diagonally across the canvas. The strings are suggested by thin, parallel lines that intersect the planes, creating a visual rhythm. A portion of what might be the guitars sound hole is visible in warm brown tones, offering a point of contrast to the cooler blues dominating the rest of the composition.
The artist’s choice to deconstruct the object implies an interest not in its literal appearance but in its underlying structure and essence. The geometric fragmentation can be interpreted as a visual metaphor for the process of musical creation – the breaking down of notes into their constituent parts, or perhaps the way music resonates within the mind.
The painting’s subtexts might also touch upon themes of perception and representation. By challenging conventional notions of perspective and form, the artist invites viewers to actively engage with the work and reconstruct its meaning. The deliberate ambiguity inherent in the abstraction encourages multiple interpretations, moving beyond a simple depiction of an object toward a more conceptual exploration of music and visual language.