Still Life with Guitar

The textured surface, high colouring and complex composition is typical of Gertler’s still lifes during the 1930s. Musical instruments, in combination with other still life objects, were a common motif during this period. After the Slade School of Art (1908-12) Gertler embraced Post-Impressionism. His most radical work, 'Merry-Go-Round', completed in 1916, expressed his pacifist views during the First World War. During the 1920s, part of a wider European return to figuration, he concentrated on female subjects, particularly nudes, and still lifes, revisiting these subjects in the 1930s with a new concentration on form and composition.