In 1912, Pablo Picasso made a guitar. Cobbled together from cardboard, paper, string, and wire—materials he cut, folded, threaded, and glued—Picasso's instrument resembled no artwork ever seen before. In 1914 the artist reiterated his fragile construction in more fixed and durable sheet metal form. The two Guitars—one in cardboard, one in metal—bracket an intense period of experimentation in which Picasso embraced ready-made materials, artisans' techniques, and common still life subjects.

Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores this breakthrough moment in Cubism and in twentieth-century art, bringing together some sixty-five closely related collages, constructions, drawings, paintings, and photographs created by the artist as he moved between studios in Paris and the South of France in the years immediately prior to World War I.