Guitar and Newspaper

This painting shows one of the recurring elements in this stage of the artist's work, the guitar, an instrument that would fascinate other artists of his generation as well, such as Pablo Picasso.
Making the singer's instrument a symbol of his soul was a resource found in aesthetic literature that Gris would possibly have known about. Later, especially between 1913 and 1916, when guitars and violins became the main motifs of his painting, they had a similar implicit meaning, since the instruments of Gris often have a magisterial quality that gives them the qualities of a reverential object. On occasions, an instrument and a piece of sheet music dominate the still life, indicating that Gris had certain precedents in mind, such as those appearing in the work of Chardin, who Gris took as an example of the French tradition in painting. The combination of an instrument with sheet music is an allegorical conventionalism used to celebrate the attributes of music; for Gris it was a reinterpretation of the 1906 guitar that symbolizes the musician. In a certain way, the instrument is a confrontation of symbols that evoke art in general, the art created by Gris and, naturally, Gris himself.