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Manifestations of Hyper-rationality in Table, Guitar and Bottle

Table, Guitar and Bottle is a cubist painting made by Pablo Picasso in the year 1919.

Picasso has used oil paint to work on the 50 by 29.5 inch canvas. This painting falls in the most

definitive period of the artists life, in which he explored and developed the potential of Cubism.

As a result, he came to considered one of the founding fathers of the cubist style which, in a

nutshell, experimented with the breakdown of illusionistic space1. Table, Guitar and Bottle is a

prime example of Picassos exploration of the ideas of space and depth. The paintings title

immediately evokes three-dimensional images. However, the painting itself is overwhelmingly

two-dimensional and at first sight looks like a random collection of mostly square and

rectangular shapes. Picasso shocks the viewer into reconsidering their perception of otherwise

familiar and mundane objects with this painting. Table, Guitar and Bottle exemplifies Picassos

almost scientific pursuit to portray seen objects in their most basic form devoid of superfluous

and imagined details. In the painting, he initiates a process based on rational observation in

order to reach a truthful representation.

In contrast to the simplicity of the paintings title, the three subjects are rather hard to

locate and constantly merge with the background as well as other objects in the painting. The

viewer eye has to move across the different shapes in order to locate the desired objects and

rarely finds them in one piece or wholly exposed. After some time the painting begins to make

more sense. The table is the easiest to detect and the curved table top lies a few inches below the

center. The table legs are curved to the left of the central axis and angular at its right side. There

11. Melissa McQuillan, "Picasso, Pablo." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University
Press,http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T067316 .
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is more than one possible guitar shape visible. The most obvious one is right above the paintings

center, where we can see a circle partly drawn in a square shape with ruled horizontal lines

crossing through it meant to represent the guitar hole and strings. A little to the left of these, the

curved head of the guitar peaks out again after the guitar is lost behind other objects. At some

distance to the right of the guitar hole, the guitar handle juts out into the background. The

painting is asymmetrical but offers illusions of symmetry. This can be observed through the

middle axiss division of a shape in the lower center of the painting. The parts on either side of

the axis are similar in shape but have different dimensions, and in fact portray an even more

basic representation of a guitar. The white object on the left of the axis has a rectangular head

with a semi-circle cut out on its lower left side. Below the head is a narrower rectangle, which is

projecting vertically, with a base that gets wider again, calling to mind a guitar handle the

entire shape suggesting a guitar lying sideways. Creating different representations of the same

object effectively, and our ability to see the unity between them along with the difference, is

suggestive of the flexibility of the human mind.

Picasso also plays with scale in the painting, and seems to be disregarding the rules of a

strictly accurate scalar representation. The bottles, which relative to the guitar and table should

be the smallest, are in fact disproportionately large. There is one behind the square with the

guitar hole in the upper center of the picture and another one with towards its left. These bottles,

like the other objects in the painting, are only partly exposed, as the shapes and objects in the

painting are placed on top of each other in a stack. This overlapping creates a shallow recession

in space. The arrangement of color in the painting also lends to the creation of a small degree of

depth, as the cooler hues are present in the background and the warmer ones progress to the

front. The background, foreground and middleground also suggested even though they merge
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into one another. As a result, though the painting is largely two dimensional, hints of the third

dimension are present.

In Table, Guitar and Bottle, Picasso breaks apart the different objects and destroys a

conventional method of representing them. In doing so, he clears the ground for an objective

reconstruction. He does away with the expected rounded dimensions of the paintings subjects,

whittling them down to their essential geometry. The extensive use of ruled lines and the rigidity

and solidity of the shapes indicate great effort on the artists part to portray something exactly as

it is, unadulterated by flaws in visual perception that a freehand drawing might bring into the

mix. In doing all this, the painting adequately reflects the cubist vision: The cubists job was to

switch on the current again between the brain and the eye, between what one saw and what one

knew; to bring mental help to the eye which has become hypertrophied, had run amok as if

possessing an animal life of its own2. Picassos deconstruction of objects in the painting serves

as a tool to study its composite parts, in a bid to arrive at an accurate understanding of the entire

object. The guitar in the upper center, for instance, is not present as a cohesive whole. Its handle

is placed separately and from its head and middle, with parts of it hidden from the viewers eyes.

Again, what emerges is a style akin to a scientific methodology: Picasso, asked how he

proceeded to paint fish, answered I eat it first The painter had become anatomist, dissecting

guitar and bottle the wood or glass here, the profile there, the elevation, the plane, the slice3.

The subdued use of color in the painting with a palette of mostly greys, browns and blacks,

another cubist convention, also reflects the purpose of a straightforward representation. The use

22. Jean Charlot, "Requiescat in Pace." The American Scholar 8, no. 1(1938-1939): 106,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41206470.

33. Charlot, Requiescat in Pace, 109.

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of vibrant color might distract from the task of simplification, and may trigger the imagination

instead of encouraging the viewer to see what is strictly in front of them.

As Picasso reconstructs the painting, he proves that his way of seeing yields some

interesting results. He shows that not only can the same object be represented differently and be

recognizable, but that a certain shape can come to be portray entirely different things. For

instance, the large tilted grey square in the middle of the painting below all the other objects

looks like a canvas. However, after observing the other bottles in the painting, the viewer is

struck with the similarity and wonders whether or not this shape too is an oversized bottle

representation, with a brown cork projecting into the grey border of the painting at the top center.

This revelation too lends to the strongly intellectual character of Picassos cubist work. Table,

Guitar and Bottle, like other paintings belonging to this category of style, and phase in the

artists life, does not seek to make the viewer feel. Instead, after looking at the painting,

emotion seems redundant and the mind and eye are called in for a collaborative effort to

objectively understand what the painting is trying to convey. Picasso seems to have imbued

intentionally or unintentionally his work from other stylistic periods with this same hyper-

rational spirit. As a result, some critical voiced have assessed that Picasso is unable to create as

powerful a statement in works involving human subjects and an emotional subject matter as he

does in his cubist paintings of objects4. Though Picasso, as an artist, had many phases, the cubist

discipline which he helped to create seems to have carried over to the periods that followed its

development and exploration.

44. Wyndham Lewis, "Picasso," The Kenyon Review 2, no. 2 (1940): 204,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332152.
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One of the most noticeable characteristics of the painting is the intentional obscurity of its

subjects. Had the subjects not been indicated in the title, the viewer would probably not have

been able to figure out where the artist intended to draw our focus. All the objects in the painting

overlap with another and draw attention away from it. Furthermore, the painting is crowded, with

not much empty space to relive the viewers eye from the onslaught of stimulus. Many of the

indistinguishable objects in the picture seem to demand the same attention and have an almost

equal relevance as the table, guitar and bottle. The choice of palette and hues also lends to this

impression. Color has not been used to draw attention to the subjects in the title, and the most

vivid color in the painting, a rusty red, has been sparingly used for some unidentifiable objects.

One critic compares this aspect of Picassos cubist work with Gertrude Steins (a writer who also

served as a subject for one of Picassos portraits), saying that: Every page is literally as

important as the other page, just as every part of the cubist painting is as important as every other

part5. This process of spreading the viewers attention thinly over the extent of the painting

suggests an intellectually rigorous endeavor to take into consideration more than a single object

in order to truly understand that object. Picasso seems to be suggesting that the form of a guitar

cannot be understood in isolation. It needs to be compared and contrasted to the other objects

simplified to their basic geometric shapes. The scattering of shapes, especially those that seem to

represent the same object, all over the painting is also indicative of Picassos ambition to make

representations of the object from different perspectives in order to do justice to its form. The

legs of a pedestal table, for instance, may have more emphasized curves when seen from a

certain angle, whereas from another angle, they may look strikingly sharp-edged and angular. In

55. L.T. Fitz, "Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces, " American Literature
42, no. 2 (1973): 231, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924449.
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keeping with his exacting method of scientifically accurate portrayal, Picasso included both

representations.

The flatness of Table, Guitar and Bottle draws attention to surfaces. This is aided by the

evocation of different textures that Picasso does with paint. The curved guitar head and the top of

the pedestal table seem to possess the graininess of wood. The bottle corks are smooth like

rubber. This focus on surface is also highly characteristic of the cubist style, and ties in with the

struggle not to express the things he did not see, that is to say the things that everybody is

certain of seeing but they really do not see6. Picasso sacrifices depth in the painting, a decision

that may have pejorative consequences, in his search for representational honesty. He is

highlighting in this painting among others that we interact with the surfaces of objects, and

not with the additional dimension of their depth. Despite this ambition, however, Table, Guitar

and Bottle does at times defy its own structure. It suggests depth and occasionally entertains the

third dimension. This fact lends to the complexity of Picassos work and indicates the effort he

has to put to strip away the layers of perception in order to reach the basic form of a seen object:

for Picasso, even at this cerebral moment in the evolution of Cubism, a picture cannot be

totally independent of perceived reality, but must stand, however remotely, as a metaphor for

something observed7. Picasso is not always able to achieve the ideal of representation that he

has set, which indicates the difficulty of that process.

66. Fitz, Gertrude Stein and Picasso, 229.

77. Robert Rosenblum, "Picasso: At the Philadelphia Museum of Art," Philadelphia Museum of
Art Bulletin 62, no. 292 (1967): 175, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3795176.
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In conclusion, Table, Guitar and Bottle emerges as a strongly cubist painting, conforming

to many of the styles laws and epitomizing the intellectual search for truthful representation that

the style as a whole endorses. The painting may appear somewhat mundane, and is difficult to

engage with in the beginning, but this is where its strength lies. In trying to make sense of the

painting, the viewer has to call to aid mental faculties which are necessary in understanding a

way of thinking and seeing that is so strongly at odds with the normative processes of thought

and vision.
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Bibliography:

Fitz, L.T. "Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Language of Surfaces." American
Literature 42, no.
2 (1973): 228-37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924449.

Jean, Charlot. "Requiescat in Pace." The American Scholar 8, no. 1(1938-

1939): 102-14.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41206470.

Lewis, Wyndham. "Picasso." The Kenyon Review 2, no. 2 (1940): 196-211.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332152.

Melissa McQuillan. "Picasso, Pablo." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art

Online. Oxford University
Press,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T067316

Rosenblum, Robert. "Picasso: At the Philadelphia Museum of Art."

Philadelphia Museum of Art
Bulletin 62, no. 292 (1967): 167-203.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3795176.