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Pablo Picasso, Accordionist, Céret, summer 1911

A decisive moment in the development of Cubism occurred during the summer of 1911, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque painted side by side in Céret, in the French Pyrenees. In Picasso’s Accordionist, made during this time, the traditional relationship between figure and ground has been destroyed and replaced by a unified pictorial configuration. The extreme degree of fragmentation; flat, shaded planes; nondescriptive regularized brushstrokes; monochromatic color; and shallow space are all characteristic of the first, “Analytic” phase of Cubism.

With diligence, one can distinguish the general outlines of the seated accordionist, the centrally located folds of the accordion and its keys, and, in the lower portion of the canvas, the volutes of an armchair. But Picasso’s elusive references to recognizable forms and objects cannot always be precisely identified and, as New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. observed, “The mysterious tension between painted image and ‘reality’ remains.”

Accordionist (L’Accordéoniste), Céret, summer 1911. Oil on canvas. 51 1/4 X 35 1/4 inches. Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim 37.537.