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We know from Pierre Daix that Man with a Clarinet was painted by Picasso in his studio on the Boulevard de Clichy in the autumn of 1911 or the winter of 1912, after the artist had spent the summer in Céret in the French Pyrenees working closely with Braque. This was the time when Analytical Cubism reached its most developed stage, which Kahnweiler was to call Hermetic. The present work is a masterpiece of this style and as early as 1913 was reproduced by Apollinaire in his text Les peintres cubistes.
Through the use of a pyramidal composition which fans out from the base, Picasso depicts a man with a clarinet, of which only the most basic elements are decipherable. The framework of the man's figure is constructed simply on the basis of a few straight and curved lines, responding, according to Daix, to the influence of the pyramidal forms of the architecture in Céret. This fragmentation encourages an abstract rather than a figurative reading by the spectator and shows how the Analytical Cubism developed by Picasso and Braque moved towards abstraction.
The colours are reduced to a broad range of ochres and greys, with which Picasso achieves extraordinary tonal contrasts and pictorial effects, while the colour has been applied with a neo Impressionist technique in small concentrated brushstrokes which give the surface of the painting a rather metallic look. As Christopher Green noted in his study of the painting (1995), "The surface of the work is not homegeneous, enhancing its presence as a material object, a tableau objet." In the centre of the painting the paint is built up in thick strokes, in contrast to the edges where it has been applied in thin layers, thus producing the effect of a very low relief texture.
While Picasso was working on Man with a Clarinet in late 1911 he had begun a new relationship-at that time of a clandestine nature. Eva Gouel was the lover of the painter Marcoussi and was the complete opposite of Fernande, being far more intelligent and active. Picasso met her in L'Ermitage in Montmartre where la bande à Picasso met, and was soon captivated by her. To celebrate his new love Picasso painted a work closely related to the present one, the magnificent Woman with a Guitar (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), the first work inscribed wite Ma joile-a code reference to Eva. Ma jolie was the title of a popular song by the band of the Médrano circus whose refrain was "Oh ma Jolie, mon coeur te dit bonjour."
Man with a Clarinet was sold by Kahnweiler in 1912 to the Paris based German collector Wilhelm Udhe whom Picasso had painted in 1910. During World War I Udhe's art collection was confiscated as he was a German citizen (as also happened to Kahnweiler) and was sold at public auction at the Hôtel Drouot on 21 May 1921. At that sale Man with a Clarinet was bought by an anonymous buyer. When the picture was auctioned from Udhe's collection André Breton had the opportunity to examine and admire it, describing it as "a work of fabulous elegance."
In 1937 it entered the collection of the historian of Cubism Douglas Cooper and shortly after his death was acquired by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in 1982.
Paloma Alarcó
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