Guitars and Mandolins

This panel is from the series Camacho’s Wedding, painted by Sert for one of the gala dining rooms in the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.

It is not surprising that music was among the most important of Sert’s sources of inspiration, both aesthetically and iconographically. Musicians and instruments are among his most recurring pictorial motifs, ranging from his early depictions of Apollo to the black trumpet player who habitually appears in his paintings from the 1920s onwards. Three of the fifteen panels that comprise this series make direct reference to music. Guitars, drums and trombones regularly appear in these paintings, as do groups of dancing women. The present panel clearly refers to Spanish folk culture and popular music while in the composition entitled The Band, also in this series, the presence of the black musician suggests jazz music, which became extremely popular in the US and Europe from the 1920s onwards. Tradition and modernity are permanently linked in Sert’s work.