Still Life with Door, Guitar and Bottles

The painting is an abstraction of a still life featuring a guitar, two bottles, and fragments of a room. Still lifes were a favourite motif for Cubists. They used them to create pictorial compositions that were not really concerned with an outer reality, but rather with the picture plane as a reality in itself. The Cubists’ groundbreaking innovations included the collage technique, which involved different kinds of paper being cut out and pasted onto the canvas. After 1913 Picasso and Braque began to play with illusion, painting pictures that imitated collage; this painting is one example. It was acquired by the Danish collector Christian Tetzen-Lund during World War I. It had a great impact on Danish artists during this time, as they were cut off from direct contact with the Paris art scene.