Dimensions:

Laid paper with a deckled right edge, laid down on paper

Perls Galleries, New York, 1949.
Louis E. Hellman, President of the Interpace Corporation, by whom acquired from the above for Castleton China Co.
Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, New York, 10 May 1989, lot 155.
Acquired at the above sale by a private collector. 
This work has also been directly inspected and authenticated by Maya Picasso.  Her certificate of authenticity will accompany the sale.

As during most of his life, in 1920 Picasso was simultaneously creating works of art with radically different styles. They ranged from Synthetic Cubism to neoclassicism, with a number of points in between, such as his voluminous sculptural paintings, his drawings in which the pen or pencil never left the paper, his caricatures, and his set designs and costumes for the ballet and theatre, which borrowed from both extremes and themselves introduced additional artistic styles.

Synthetic Cubism was one of Picasso’s greatest and most lyrical achievements, not to mention more brightly colored and “prettier” than the Analytic Cubism which gave rise to it. Nonetheless, it is just as complex and challenging, yet more playful, inviting our eye to travel from one corner to the next and resolve the various meanings of each work from the hints that Picasso dropped.

In Analytic Cubism Picasso divided an object into multifaceted geometric shapes. He arrayed these shapes in kinetic, impossibly intersecting planes. At the same time, he often ingeniously “pared” his object so that it could be displayed from all sides at once. Picasso used these two inventions, the multi-faceted dissections and the simultaneous multi-sided depictions either together or alone, and in later years he integrated them into new styles. Some of these later styles, especially those which divide an object into a number of planes and shapes, are often colloquially termed cubist, but such usage is inexact since these later works are worlds apart in appearance from Analytic Cubism.

Quite the opposite process, Synthetic Cubism derives its name from the assembly, or synthesis, of an object as suggested by its component geometric parts. As John Richardson, one of Picasso’s key biographers, simplifies the distinction, “analytic cubism permitted the two artists to take things apart…. Synthetic cubism…permitted Picasso and Braque to put things together again….”  (A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917)  In this vein, he was talking about of the use of extraneous materials, newspaper, fabric, wallpaper, rope, etc., which these artists attached to their canvases to create the first collages in the history of art. But his explanation equally accounts for the second distinction Synthetic Cubism bears with respect to Analytic. In Picasso’s hands, Analytic Cubism morphed into Synthetic Cubism in a different and more meaningful way than just paper cut-outs. Even without any materials on the canvas other than paint, Synthetic Cubism is readily distinguishable from its predecessor by the assembly of shapes into an object, as opposed to the dismemberment of the object into shapes. The gouache at hand is a prime example of this form of Synthetic Cubism. 

Picasso was a master of the double entendre, easily the greatest punster in the history of art. (As Richardson put it, the master's art is veritably "booby-trapped with visual jokes.") Synthetic Cubism, because of its many flat geometric shapes and implied volumes, arguably lent itself to multiple interpretations more than any other one of Picasso’s numerous styles.  Well, unlike many, chiefly Continental art historians with their flowery prose, I am not one to read symbolism into a work where it does not belong. Yet Synthetic Cubism cries out with double and triple entendres and more, and, for once, I find myself in agreement with the pundits. Our gouache is a prime example. I am convinced that it has many more intended meanings and puns than any works in its genre and, for that matter, any other Picassos that come to mind.   Having poured through the catalogues raisonnés upon multiple occasions, I also believe that it is the finest composition of any of the Guéridons that have not yet been acquired by a museum and that it rivals any of those that have. Below are various possible meanings of this work of art, in order of increasing subtlety or complexity, and their justifications.

From the deceptively simple assortment of circles, triangles, and trapezoids, perhaps the first awareness to emerge into the viewer’s consciousness is of the two legs, which in turn lead one’s gaze up through an intervening stem to the circle above. Knowing Picasso and his penchant for flattening volumes and upending tabletops, the circle naturally becomes the top of a pedestal, table (guéridon) with two legs. Or is it three? What about the inverted red triangle projected between the legs? Is that the shadow of one of them, or the suggestion of the third leg?

Then the eye moves up to examine the objects on the tabletop. No doubt about the stringed instrument, by default a guitar. There’s its head, then its gracefully long neck, and a cubist body with a geometrically complex white soundboard. The tabletop plays a second role in this composition as the body of the guitar. And just as in the table and legs, the neck and “head” of the guitar are also painted in yellow and brown, an interplay of light and dark, a not-quite mirror image. (This mirroring is echoed in the paired top and bottom trapezoids—more on them below.)

But wait--if one hasn’t yet realized the anthropomorphic features of this table and guitar, by the time one’s eyes wander to the pink liquor bottle teetering on the tabletop, with cocktail glass superimposed over its neck and stopper, one might begin to wonder to whom belongs the glass. That's easy! The neck of the guitar is the head and neck of a person, the pedestal becomes the person’s legs, the white soundboard—the chest and left shoulder, the pink triangle—the right arm holding aloft the cocktail. So what does that make the guitar's sound-hole--the navel of the figure's belly, the button of her cloak?

It doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that the bottle represents a woman, rendered in pink, naturally, and the guitar neck and soundboard a man. After all, her head is no more of an abstraction than his. The more I ponder this image, the more I'm convinced that Picasso intended all of these meanings. Yessiree, folks, what we have ourselves here is a veritable synthetic cubist precursor of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. As in that painting, the dignity of our two “figures” is reflected by their taut, upright posture.

Now that we realize that this still life doubles as a portrait, or even a double portrait, we find it intriguing to deduce who the model/s may have been. Man or woman, friend or stranger? Would you believe the artist’s pregnant wife? That would certainly explain her round belly. If this assertion can’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, it could be supported by the following arguments. Picasso’s work is famously rife with cryptic references and layers upon hidden layers of meaning. Often Picasso confided his secrets only to his works, perhaps inviting scholarship to reveal them later. A material witness to this work was Picasso’s first wife, Olga, who gave birth to his first child in February, 1921. Although it is impossible to precisely date this work, it is most stylistically similar to a number of other gouaches of a pedestal table of 1920, when she was pregnant. Similarly, when Marie-Thérèse, his secret mistress became pregnant with his second child in 1932, Picasso made a cryptic metaphorical reference to his unborn second child, at a time when the world didn't yet know of Marie-Thérèse's identity, much less of the fact that she was pregnant, in the charming painting of 1935 below:

Finally, the mirrored blue and red trapezoids must represent light and shadow streaming onto the floor from the open window behind the guéridon, as more naturalistically and incontrovertibly displayed in anumber of other  guéridon paintings of this period.

The vertical line formed by the interface between the yellow and brown halves of the guitar, the tabletop, and the pedestal, also divides the entire composition in half, with the red and blue trapezoids of the background on either side. Yet, despite splintering the picture into bright and dark, daylight and shade, this dividing line paradoxically also unifies the composition, by serving as the common feature of these disparate elements.

More improbable interpretations may also come to mind.  Would you buy that the white shape represents the head and horns of a bull?   I’m not pushing it. There are enough incontrovertible meanings already. In death as in life, Picasso remains mum about what it is exactly that he had in mind. As always, he delights in keeping us guessing. 

Not bad, from just a simple table.

John Richardson wrote the following about these paintings, “The development of this last great period of Synthetic Cubism can easily be followed through the Guéridons - still lifes on a pedestal table.... No longer did Picasso feel obligated to investigate the intricate formal and spatial problems that preoccupied him ten years before. Instead he felt free to relax and exploit his cubist discoveries in a decorative manner that delights the eye.... Never again did the artist's style recapture the air of magisterial calm that is such a feature of this last great phase of Cubism.” (Picasso, An American Tribute, New York, 1962, p. 52).

Our gouache is one of the most important and most colorful of Picasso’s small paintings of guéridons of this period. (Most of the other great ones are in the Musée Picasso in Paris.) The formalist yet lyrical, rigorous yet playful qualities of this exquisite painting epitomize Picasso’s achievements in Synthetic Cubism. Since this gouache had escaped his chronicler Zervos’ attention, Picasso presumably must have sold it early on.  It took almost seventy years in order for it to first become known to the world, by virtue of its emergence at the Sotheby’s 1989 sale.

One of the most touching testimonials to the power of Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism comes from Louis Aragon, the French poet, who received a small, related drawing or watercolor of a guéridon from Picasso. He wrote, “Picasso gave me this pedestal table in front of a shutter window in 1919 for the frontispiece of Feu de Joie: in fact, and by this very fact, it became the source of everything I wrote from this first book to the present day” (Louis Aragon, Je n’ai jamais appris a écrire ou les “Incipit”, Paris: Skira Flammarion, 1981, p.39).

The crowning glory of Picasso’s series of guéridons, however, must be the Grande Nature Morte au Guéridon (Large Still Life on a Pedestal Table, 1931, Musée Picasso Paris), which doubles as a veiled reference to his muse Marie-Thérèse.  Picasso has breathed so much life into this table that it has veritably begun to dance:

It may be instructive to note the sale result of the most comparable synthetic cubist work on paper in the current market, below:

Entitled Homme à la Pipe Assis dans un Fauteuil (1916), it's an oil, gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper laid down on canvas, 32 x 24.8 cm, which fetched $4,744,000 at auction in May, 2007. It's a wonderful piece and more complex in a way than our Guéridon. On the other hand, Le Guéridon has many more layers of (intended!) meaning and is much livelier, brighter, and more colorful.