In the summer and autumn of 1912, while living with Eva in the town of Sorgues-sur-l’Ouvèze, Picasso was literally possessed by one subject: some fifteen paintings of that season depict violins and guitars. This was lyrical painting, steeped in emotions relating the shapes of these instruments to the female form and aspiring to create a harmonic and tangible image out of different elements of form, rhythm, texture, both of material and painted surface, and colour. This art embraces the world’s sensual diversity; not accidentally some of these still lifes bear the inscription: J’aime Eva.

Violin is one of Picasso’s first and most harmonious works of that period. The painting can hardly be classed as a still life: its formative idea is better expressed by the words tableau-objet, which Picasso himself used. Indeed the painted image of the violin is already furnished by the harmonious oval of the canvas; the instrument is recognisably presented in the compositional nucleus by the frank statement of its material qualities (the wavy texture and honey-coloured tones of the wood), as well as of its elegant details (the sound-holes and the curves of the sounding board). This nucleus seems to bulge spherically outwards owing to the passage of fractionalised forms that retreat rhythmically towards the edges of the work. Thus, the entire composition acquires equilibrium, not because of the stability of the object depicted, nor because of the overall pyramidal construction, but because of the daring oval shape (a real tectonic challenge), locked into place by its nucleus like a keystone supporting an arch.

This unstable, vertical ellipse of canvas, which cannot stand but only hang on a wall, tempted the artist to seek new compositional principles for sculptures that would seem to hang or float in the space of an oval form. The painting is presented here by dissociated aspects of its reality—masses, planes and surfaces, contours and elements, symbols of sorts. An entry in his sketchbook tells us that it was indeed in Sorgues that Picasso began to aspire to “find equilibrium between nature and one’s imagination.”[38]

Musical instruments, considered a lyrical subject by Picasso, continued to occupy his imagination for many months. In the autumn of 1912, in Paris, attempting to realise his new vision, he again turned to three-dimensional sculptural forms to create a family of spatial constructions in the shape of guitars. Made of grey cardboard, these new “sculptures” do not “imitate” real instruments, but recreate their images through spatially linked and partially overlapping flat silhouettes of planes that form open volumes. At the end of 1912, these new lyrical objects as well as the oval tableau-objets, destined only to hang on walls, furnished the impulse for endless new interpretations of musical instruments in pasted-paper works (papiers collés) and pictures (thus gainsaying the often accepted view that the guitars and violins were cut to pieces randomly, as if by some cruel vivisectionist, and then put together helter-skelter).

Among the works belonging to this period and style we find such pictures as Violin, Wineglass, Pipe and Inkwell and Clarinet and Violin, in which the clearly dominant structural principle of flat, frontal planes points to a link with pasted-paper techniques and sculptured constructions. But if the former seems only a more imposing, assured and decorative version of the small, oval Violin from the Moscow museum, the apparently modest canvas Clarinet and Violin is both a virtuoso sketch with a new compositional structure and a concise formulation of Picasso’s latest pictorial conception (in broader terms, of plastic art), which had ripened over the six years of his Cubism.

An absolutely flat, black plane retreats behind a brown one, to which it is solidly linked by a small, cream-coloured square. This feeling of depth, achieved with such simplicity and skill, clarifies the spatial relations of both instruments, which are sparingly traced by a simple brush drawing. Meanwhile, the colours of the instruments (ebony for the clarinet and a grainy coffee-brown for the violin), although proportional in mass, are dissociated from their shapes and have even shifted from one instrument to the other and changed their spatial relationships.

Presented simultaneously, but not together, the colours of objects and forms, their masses and shapes, are conceived as independent forces that come into play with each other and with our imagination. This astonishing method clearly reveals the anatomy of the plastic metaphor that Picasso called trompe-l’esprit, which is actually nothing but a poetic image—that is, according to Garcia Lorca, one “based on the mutual exchange of appearance, destination and functions among Nature’s different objects and ideas.”[39]

It was with an amazing degree of freedom, resourcefulness and grace that Picasso applied the rule of plastic metaphor to the pasted-paper technique, which revolutionised the possibilities of painting. Here is his own comment: “Aside from rhythm, one of the things that strikes us most strongly in nature is the difference of textures; the texture of space, the texture of an object in that space—a tobacco wrapper, a porcelain vase—and beyond that the relation of form, colour, and volume to the question of texture. The purpose of papier collé was to give the idea that different textures can enter into a composition to become the reality in the painting that competes with the reality in nature. We tried to get rid of trompe-l’œil to find tomple-l’esprit.”[40] Not a single one of the papier collé components is ever taken in its direct meaning; all are allegories and metaphors.