Three Musicians
Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973) · Summer 1921
Three masked figures sit in a row behind a table, like performers on a tiny stage. On the left a Pierrot in white plays a clarinet, in the middle a Harlequin in a diamond patterned costume strums a guitar, and on the right a monk in a dark robe holds a sheet of music. Under the table lies a dog, its tail and paws poking out between the legs. The characters come from the commedia dell'arte, the Italian masked theatre that Picasso loved, and they are painted in flat, interlocking shapes of colour that look as if they had been cut out of paper and pasted down.
That is precisely the point. Ten years earlier, Picasso and Georges Braque had invented collage, sticking newspaper, wallpaper and sheet music onto their Cubist canvases. Three Musicians translates that technique back into paint on a mural scale. Look at how each shape has a hard edge and a single colour, how the black background is broken by the white and yellow planes, and how the sheet music on the right imitates the real music sheets Picasso once glued into his pictures. The result is playful, but the arrangement is as precise as a jigsaw.
Picasso painted two versions in the summer of 1921 at Fontainebleau; the other is in Philadelphia. Many writers have read this one as a memorial to friendship: the Pierrot as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had died in 1918, the monk as Max Jacob, who had just entered a monastery, and the Harlequin as Picasso himself. MoMA acquired it in 1949 through the Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. Notice how the dog's shadowy shape almost disappears into the dark, a hidden joke in a picture full of masks.
Did You Know? The dog under the table is thought to be a portrait of a real hound that belonged to Picasso, and it appears in a different position in the Philadelphia version.
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