Flasche, Glas, Gabel

Picasso painted this in the spring of 1912, working so closely with Georges Braque that the two later said they were roped together like mountaineers. Between them they had spent four years taking objects apart, and by this point the fracturing had gone about as far as it could before the subject vanished altogether. The title tells you what to hunt for, a bottle, a glass, a fork on a cafe table, but you have to assemble them from shards of brown and grey. Picasso keeps a thread back to the real world with stencilled letters, scraps of a word, the kind you would read on a newspaper folded beside your drink.