Three Musicians

Three masked musicians - a harlequin with a violin, a Pierrot with a clarinet, and a dark-robed monk with an accordion - sit side by side, rendered as flat, brightly colored interlocking shapes that resemble cut and pasted paper. Picasso composed this grand, almost mural-sized work as the culminating statement of Synthetic Cubism. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, Three Musicians is monumental and festive yet faintly melancholy, the costumed players perhaps standing for the painter and his friends - the flat, jigsaw geometry of late Cubism turned into a stately, enigmatic carnival.