1912

Man with a Guitar

Spanish, 1881 - 1973

This painting was completed in the summer or early autumn of 1912 at Les Clochettes, a villa that Picasso rented in Sorgues, near Avignon, in the south of France. It was later included in the first Surrealist exhibition, which took place at Galerie Pierre Loeb in Paris in November 1925. It is not known if Picasso had any say in the selection of this work, but André Breton, the French poet and Surrealist leader, greatly admired the visual ambiguities of Picasso's Cubist paintings, which by the following decade had lost none of their power to shock and bewilder the public.