Guitar and Pipe

A guitar and a pipe break apart into angular, overlapping shapes, their forms scattered across the canvas in ochre, black, white, and blue. The composition reads as a still life, built from fractured planes rather than a single continuous view, with a painting also folded into the arrangement. This picture, titled Guitar and Pipe, was made in 1913 using oil and charcoal on canvas, and it is held at the Dallas Museum of Art, where it came into the collection through the Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc. The artist, Juan Gris (1887–1927), worked within cubism, the same approach that shaped his piece Carafe and Book. Looking closely, the geometric facets of the guitar's body dissolve into the surrounding shapes, making the instrument emerge only gradually from the pattern of lines and color blocks.