It’s 1912, and Pablo Picasso is in Paris, thinking: All right, what’s next? A few years earlier he painted the remarkable picture “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” People had thrown up their hands in alarm; his friends hardly knew what to say. Energized by the fuss, he punched out variations on the theme: paintings of sharp-elbowed, wood-brown nude women, their bodies all ax-cut facets, set in pockets of shallow space.

He’d changed history with this work. He’d replaced the benign ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings. He’d made art as much a problem as a pleasure. At the same time he left fundamentals unchanged. The human figure remained sovereign, abstraction unexplored. So there were further leaps to take. And Picasso had to ask himself how far he was willing to go.

Quite far, it turned out, and exactly how far is the subject of “Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914,” a subtly buzzing manifesto of an exhibition that opened February 20 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s made up of 70 smallish, thematically related objects : paintings, drawings, collages and combinations thereof, along with two renowned sculptures, one seen complete for the first time since it left Picasso’s studio after his death.

Piece by piece it’s entrancing. Taken as a whole it’s a record of a brief but intense revolution that generated some of the most challenging ideas in modern art.

By 1912, inspired by his friend Georges Braque, Picasso turned his attention away from figures to still lifes. And the two men developed what would come to be called Cubism.

An elaborate composition of slicedup objects and tipsy stacked planes titled “Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe,” from the fall of 1912, has the earmarks of a dense collage, right down to a bit of cut-and-paste-style text and faint shadows showing between the stacked planes. But the shadows and text are brushed on. It is oil on canvas.

Soon, though, Picasso is expanding his formal repertory. “Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass,” from later in the fall of 1912, is a collage, made from cut newspaper, sheet music and fauxwood paper.

And in a particularly stylish collage called “Guitar,” dated March 31, 1913, there’s no paint at all. What’s left is Cubist realness . There’s a ghost of the shape of a guitar in there somewhere, all cut up .

Today, nearly a century on, it’s hard to grasp how disturbing such work was to some at the time.

When the Parisian arts journal Les Soirees de Paris ran a photograph of one of Picasso’s sculptural guitars constructed from paperboard and string, furious letters came in; subscriptions were canceled.

That sculpture is the centerpiece of the show. Picasso made it in Paris in 1912. It embodies many of the aesthetic questions that Cubism raised: What’s real? And why is one version of real better than another? What makes an object art, and an idea not?

Precisely because it evokes such ideas, the paperboard guitar, along with a later sheet-metal version of it, also in the show, was one of the most influential sculptures of the 20th century. Picasso seems to have valued it highly. Despite requests, he didn’t exhibit it during his lifetime. He left it to MoMA at his death, in 1973.

In 2005 an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania, Christine Poggi, inquired whether the sculpture, as MoMA had exhibited it, was missing a component, a round slice of cardboard that had originally formed a “tabletop” on which the guitar had rested. A search of museum storage was undertaken. The tabletop, cut from a cardboard box, was located and put in place.

After 1914 Picasso embarked on a new story, or rather picked up an old one. He went back to the figure, in Ingres-like portraits, chiton-clad maidens and fleshy, somnolent Rubenesque nudes, who seem to know nothing at all about the race of erotic warriors he had introduced years before, or about the startling little worlds-within-the-world collages, so audacious and so delicate, that survive from the Cubist revolution, which was Picasso’s very finest hour.


HOLLAND COTTER
ART REVIEW