Pablo Picasso. Guitar , October Filed under art , media Pablo Picasso. Bar Table with Guitar , spring Private collection. Photo: Bob Kolbrener. Edward F. Maquette for Guitar variant state , October Guitar and Bottles , Raspail, Paris. Wall of the studio at boulevard Raspail, November—December Figure 1 Pablo Picasso.
Who has done this? The sculptural object before cubism is physically indivisible. This condition changed when techniques of carving, modeling, and casting were replaced by construction—the fabrication of the object from a variety of discrete intersecting or eliding planes, which was first deployed in or in the cubist work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. The properties of constructed fabrication constitute a system of small but crucial operations determined by a narrow set of means.
These means consist of cutting the cutting of paper and, in one case, sheet metal and the fitting together of elements the planes , which serve as articulated, attachable parts. Such methods are not limited to the production of the sculptural object. Pictorial work of this kind is itself composed of physically autonomous elements: again, cuttings of paper including drawing paper and commercial printed paper that are generally affixed to a sheet—a paper support.
The earliest constructions take the form of wall-mounted sculptural reliefs; in and of itself, this fact represents a conventional proximity of pictorial to sculptural space. Yet the material factors of construction and affixed paper signify an unprecedented conjunction—almost a crossover—of pictorial and sculptural means. These fabrication techniques were originally adopted in order to support the conceptual maneuvers of cubist representation.
In multiple ways, such objects are conditional. A system of cut and attached parts means that the steps or procedures for making the object also allow for its real or imagined unmaking, a simple reciprocity that does not exist in the conventional practice of painting, drawing, or sculpture.
