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View source →Man with a Guitar
Pablo Picasso, 1912
Technical Details
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
131.8 × 89 cm (51.9 × 35 in)
Style
Analytic Cubism
Decade
1910s
About This Work
In Man with a Guitar, Picasso reduces the musician, instrument, and surrounding space to a dense arrangement of faceted planes. The sitter can still be sensed behind the interlocking browns, grays, and muted ochres, but the composition asks the viewer to reconstruct the subject slowly rather than absorb it at a glance. The guitar functions as both an identifying motif and a structural device: its curves, strings, and sound hole become repeated signals through which the picture tests how a recognizable object can survive radical visual analysis.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art records that Picasso completed this painting in the summer or early autumn of 1912 at Les Clochettes, a villa he rented in Sorgues near Avignon. It belongs to the moment when Analytic Cubism pushed representation toward near-abstraction. Later inclusion in the first Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre Loeb in 1925 shows how subsequent artists and writers continued to find provocative ambiguity in Picasso's Cubist construction.
Current Location
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA
Public Collection — Open to visitors
Visit museum website →Valuation & Provenance
2026 Estimated Value
Not publicly offered
* Estimates are based on comparable auction results and market analysis. Not a formal appraisal.
Last Known Sale
No public auction record — held in permanent museum collection
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