''The Accordionist'' (French: ''L’accordéoniste'') is a 1911

oil on canvas Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest o ...

painting by

Pablo Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

. The painting portrays a seated man playing an

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German ''Akkordeon'', from ''Akkord''—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a ree ...

. The division of three-dimensional forms into a two-dimensional plane indicates that the painting is in the style of Analytical Cubism, which was developed by Picasso and

Georges Braque Georges Braque ( , ; 13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he play ...

between 1907 and 1914. The painting is now in the

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

in New York City.

Background

This painting was produced during a period in Picasso's art known as Analytical Cubism.

Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...

was developed between 1907 and 1914 by Picasso and Georges Braque after they met in 1907. It was an innovative new style of art, which in its early stages involved breaking surfaces into sharply defined planes. In 1911, Picasso and Georges Braque spent the summer at

Céret Céret (; ) is a commune in the Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France. It is the capital of the historic Catalan comarca of Vallespir. Geography The town lies in the foothills of the Pyrénées mountains, in southern France. ...

, in the French Pyrenees, a period that is considered to be an important moment in the development of Cubism. The onset of cubism can be viewed as a rejection of traditional painting techniques and realistic imitations of the natural world. Traditional techniques, like modelling and perspective, were replaced by fractured objects reduced to geometric shapes and shallow space. The subject could also be depicted from multiple viewpoints. Until 1910, the subject of cubist artworks could still be interpreted, as the figure or object in the paintings was conveyed in a fractured form, but reassembled to a certain extent to offer a distinguishable representation of the subject. However, from 1910 to 1912, Picasso and Braque abstracted their works even further, by reducing the subject to just a series of overlapping planes that were more complex and difficult to comprehend. The paintings of this period were also dominated by near monochromatic hues of brown, grey and black.

Description

The complex fragmented composition of ''The Accordionist'' requires some persistence in order to determine the outlines of the subject. The painting displays a seated accordionist, which is defined by a series of vertically aligned triangular planes, semicircles and right angles. The folds of the accordion and its keys can be located in the centre, while the lower area of the canvas displays the volutes of an armchair.

Significance and legacy

''The Accordionist'' demonstrates how Picasso developed the innovative style of Cubism to the point of complete abstraction. It has been described as a "baffling composition" and is so incomprehensible that its former owners mistook it for a landscape because it bears the inscription "

" on the reverse. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum states that, "Picasso’s elusive references to recognizable forms and objects cannot always be precisely identified and, as the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. observed, 'the mysterious tension between painted image and 'reality' remains'."

External links

*
The Accordionist
' at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Accordionist, The 1911 paintings Paintings by Pablo Picasso Paintings of people Paintings in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum *The Accordionist Musical instruments in art Portraits of men