Guitar and Bottle

Pablo Picasso, 1913

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About This Work

Executed in 1913 during the height of Pablo Picasso’s pioneering exploration of Cubism, Guitar and Bottle is a delicate yet structurally rigorous work created in graphite on laid paper. The composition presents an intricate arrangement of geometric planes, overlapping contours, and abstracted rectilinear frames that deconstruct everyday objects into fundamental visual elements. At the center, the simplified silhouette of a guitar emerges through sweeping curved lines and a circular sound hole, juxtaposed with the cylindrical and vertical forms denoting a bottle. Shading and subtle tonal gradations within specific planes create a sense of tactile depth across the flat surface, bridging linear abstraction with tangible spatial presence. The inscription in an unknown hand notes the title, while watermarks embedded in the handmade laid paper attest to the work’s material authenticity, reflecting Picasso’s profound conceptual interrogation of still-life representation.

Created in 1913, Guitar and Bottle belongs to a transformative period when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque revolutionized modern art through Cubist experimentation. During these years, Picasso frequently turned to familiar domestic motifs—such as musical instruments and bottles—to explore perceptual multiplicity and semiotic representation without relying on traditional illusionism. This drawing passed through the legendary Galerie Kahnweiler in Paris, appearing in the fourth Kahnweiler Collection sale at the Hôtel Drouot in May 1923, before eventually entering the collection of Sara L. Lepman and ultimately finding its permanent home in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Documented in Christian Zervos’s canonical catalogue raisonné (Vol. VI, no. 1105) and featured in major exhibitions such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso Guitars, 1912–1914, the work exemplifies Picasso’s radical reinvention of drawing as an autonomous intellectual and structural medium.

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