The turn of the 20^th century was met with many exciting changes that swept throughout our society.  In response, artists began to make new and bold interpretations of our world, echoing the challenges of seeing and interpreting this emerging new order with renewed senses.  One of the greatest pioneers of this artistic exploration was the Spanish master Pablo Picasso. As the father of a radical new technique known as cubism, Picasso dismantled everyday objects and loosely reassembled them in ways that raised questions about how we view life around us. A clear example of this is found in his 1913 work, Guitar and Bottle of Bass.  In this piece, Picasso employs cubism to tap into our subconscious, using art to help the viewer discover the uniqueness of his individuality.

Guitar and Bottle of Bass is a culmination of Picasso’s cultivation of cubism, as it vividly rips apart the conventional form and builds a piece that is intellectually accessible.  It is an example of Synthetic Cubism, which takes a deconstructed object and reassembles a new interpretation of the original form.  The piece also incorporates the Papier collé technique, a hybrid of painting and collage making that incorporates pieces of attached material into a painting so that they become objects in the painting themselves.  The piece is created on a wood panel, and incorporates bits of wood, nails, and paper to represent the two subjects.

A series of white pieces of wood are attached to the center of the panel/canvass, and can easily be distinguished as the neck, fret board, saddle and bridge of the guitar.  Additionally, there are white markings at in the upper left corner of the panel that suggest the instrument’s headstock. The stark shade of white against the rest of the piece’s subdued brown, black and grey colors leaps from the board and gives the viewer a sort of “home base” to begin the exploration. On the right side of the piece there is a piece of half of the body of the guitar, but the image is inverted, with the bottom of the guitar closer to the neck and fret board, suggesting a relationship between the two.  This arrangement helps the eye understand what the overall image represents, but it forces the brain to relate these components as if it’s looking at a guitar for the first time.  The bottle of beer is interpreted in a pool of charcoal at the bottom of the painting, as if the deconstruction of the items caused the liquid to spill under the guitar. While the colors and rustic material can normally denote a muted emotion, this painting has an energy that brings action to still life, as if the viewer just missed the explosion that caused these objects’ redefinition.

The exploration into cubism began in 1907 with Picasso and his friend and colleague Georges Braque.  They began to fragment images and reassemble them in an abstracted form, rejecting the conventional artistic foundations of copying reality. While all its components are visible, the object is broken up into cubes that can be turned on their sides or placed opposite the canvass from their corresponding neighbors.  This freedom allows all sides of a figure to be seen simultaneously, without regard for what the eye is supposed to see at once.  The images are representational, like the white lines in Guitar and Bottle of Bass.  When those lines are viewed, for example, the mind then has to associate the image with a headstock it has seen in the past.  And then other sense memories – where the guitar was, the way it sounded  – are incorporated, and the figure reveals itself more vibrantly then in its conventional form. And since experiences vary in every single person, no two people will see it the same way.  It appears that cubism allows the art to actually accent the experiences in life, instead of life being a subject on a canvass.   It forces us to use our experiences to see what is there, instead of relying on the artist to tell us.