The Guitar (Still Life with Guitar)

By 1916 the war had scattered the Cubists. Braque and Léger were at the front, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the German dealer who had been buying their work, was stranded in Switzerland with his Paris stock seized by the French state. Gris, a Spaniard and so a non-combatant, stayed in the city with almost no income until, in April of that year, he signed with a new dealer, Léonce Rosenberg. This guitar still life belongs to that stretch. The instrument is broken into flat, hard-edged planes and locked together on a shallow table, more measured and tightly built than the collaged Cubism of a few years before. The guitar had been a Cubist favourite since Picasso first made one out of cardboard, an ordinary object with a shape worth taking apart. Gris kept the round sound-hole and the strings legible, so the eye still finds the instrument inside the geometry, painted a few hundred kilometres from the fighting at Verdun and the Somme.