Man with a Guitar

A seated man with a guitar is dissolved into a tall, shimmering scaffold of faceted browns and greys, the figure and instrument barely discernible amid the fractured planes, with a few teasing clues - a curve of the guitar, stenciled letters, a hint of a string. Georges Braque painted it at the peak of Analytic Cubism, the style he and Picasso developed in tandem. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Man with a Guitar pushes representation to the edge of legibility - the solid world rebuilt as a delicate, crystalline lattice of overlapping fragments on the flat canvas.