Collage: The Watertight Compartments of Art Are Demolished

(Pablo Picasso. Still life with Guitar, Variant state. Paris, assembled before November 15, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire installed with cut cardboard box. Gift of the artist. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

"El Guitare"

During the spring of 1914, the art critic André Salmon wrote:

"I have seen what no man has seen before in Picasso's studio.

Leaving aside painting for the moment, Picasso built this immense guitar out of sheet metal with parts that could be given to any idiot in the universe who on his own might put the object together as well as the artist himself. More phantasmagorical than Faust's laboratory, this studio (which certain people might claim had no art in the conventional sense of the term) was furnished with the newest of objects. All the visible forms surrounding me appeared absolutely new. I had never seen such new things before. I didn't even know what a new object could be.

Some visitors, already shocked by the things that they saw covering the walls, refused to call these objects paintings (because they were made of oil-cloth, packing paper and newspaper). They pointed a condescending finger at the object of Picasso's clever pains, and said: 'What is it? Does you put it on a pedestal? Does you hang it on a wall? Is it painting or is it sculpture?'

Picasso dressed in the blue of a Parisian worker responded in his finest Andalusian voice: 'It's nothing. It's el guitare!'

And there you have it! The watertight compartments of art are demolished. We are now liberated from painting and sculpture just as we were liberated from the idiotic tyranny of academic genres. It's no longer this or that. It's nothing. "It's el guitare!"

source:

Andrè Salmon. "Andrè Salmon on French Modern Art", ed. Beth S. Gersh-Nešić, Cambridge University Press, 2005: p. 150-151.