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Pablo Picasso, Femme
à la mandoline (1908)
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Approximately one year after his pioneering work Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907), Picasso gives us here a Cubist version of an iconographically older motif which can be traced back to the paintings of the Baroque age: a human being playing a musical instrument. But unlike those vivid individuals literally and figuratively in harmony with their world, as portrayed in numerous paintings by Hals etc., Picasso's female figure is a representative of modern times, irredeemably out of tune. Consisting of an assortment of geometrical forms, deprived of any facial expression, she resembles an automaton clutching a useless mandolin without strings or tuning pegs. Thus, she has become one of the early icons of modern absurdity.
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