Guitar on a Table

By 1915, when Gris set this guitar on its table in Paris, the city was in the first full year of the war and his usual buyers had scattered. That was also the year he let colour back into his Cubism, and here a deep, ringing blue takes over the cloth and holds the picture together. The guitar, the sheet music, the yellow-dotted curtain and the patterned carpet are all pressed flat onto a single plane. Only the table is allowed to act like a solid thing, its wood grain and edges painted convincingly enough to open a little pocket of real space. Gris enjoyed that friction between the flat and the solid. He also left small clues that he was building the idea of these objects instead of copying them: the guitar has five strings instead of the usual six, and the staff drawn on the sheet music has too few lines to carry a tune.