©Pablo Picasso - My beautiful. Woman with guitar 1912
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My beautiful. Woman with guitar 1912
100x64cm oil/canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Museum of Modern Art, New York:
Ma jolie (My pretty girl) was the refrain of a popular song performed at a Parisian music hall Picasso frequented. The artist suggests this musical association by situating a treble clef and music staff near the bold, stenciled letters. Ma jolie was also Picasso's nickname for his lover Marcelle Humbert, whose figure he loosely built using the signature shifting planes of Analytic Cubism. This is far from a traditional portrait of an artist's beloved, but there are clues to its representational content. The central triangular mass subtly indicates the shape of a woman's head and torso, and a group of six vertical lines at the painting's lower center represent the strings of a guitar, which the woman strums. In Cubist works of this period, Picasso and Georges Braque employed multiple modes of representation simultaneously: here, Picasso combined language (in the black lettering), symbolic meaning (in the treble clef), and near abstraction (in the depiction of his subject).