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At a young age, Pablo Picasso was recognized for his realistic techniques. During his adolescence, he had a gift of creating likenesses as he had the urge to grasp at every aspect of not only his facial features but of those who were most familiar models during this time such as his father and younger sister, in which he used to explore the limits of resemblance between his own family.
In Paris, the formation of Cubism was originally practiced and created by Picasso and a fellow artist George Braque between 1908 and 1913. In 1907, Picasso discovered the conceptual treatment of objects which he discovered in paintings by Henri Rousseau and in African sculpture whilst also being influenced by the modern urban street life of Paris for Picasso's conception of Cubism. Later on, Picasso became captivated by the process of construction and deconstruction which is evident In his cubist works. The moment when cubism started to evolve in Braque’s painting in 1908, was also when Picasso initially adopted the conceptual treatment of figures and objects in his work. However, only at the beginning of 1909 did the treatment of space and form within his paintings reveal Picasso’s new-found interest in the pictorial innovation of Cezanne.
As we can see, Braque adopted cubism a lot more quickly than Picasso did in 1910. However, Picasso still focuses on the treatment of his figures and objects making it visually clear that there is a ‘Girl with a Mandolin’, whilst Braque’s artwork ‘Women Plating a Mandolin’ is a lot harder to depict the figure which indicates that he was a little more advanced than Picasso when it came to cubism, but Picasso’s work is a lot more appealing and beautiful to view then Braque’s. it seems as though it was difficult for Picasso to adopt cubism due to his formal training in painting as he would have had to forget everything he knew about painting and start to re-train his mind in creating cubism.
In creating his Cubist piece ‘Girl with a Mandolin’, Picasso simplified figures and objects into geometric components and planes that may or may not have added up to the whole figure or object that would have appeared in the natural world. He would distort his model’s figures, and forms and would somehow simultaneously depict different points of view on the one plane. ‘A Girl with a Mandolin’ is one of the first examples of what is known as analytic cubism which evolved from 1908 to 1912. During this time, Picasso utilized a muted color palette of monochromatic greys, browns, and blacks in which he chose to convey unemotional subject matters such as landscapes and still life. At the time he did not yet incorporate elements of texture or collage but emphasized open figuration and abstraction.
In this work, he draws closer to the model presence, who at the time was posing nude; and this can be seen in the way how her gracefulness originates from the pose and the delicacy of her geometricized chest and especially her face. Picasso folds back into the plane of the canvas which is the hidden facet of the profile, but all of these factors combined make the whole painting seem harmonious and integrated on its surface.
The model is posing nude holding a mandolin (or playing the mandolin), however, we as the viewer can only visually view the top half of her body from her head to her upper thighs. The model's head is slightly angled to her left ( the viewer's right) and is slightly tilted downwards observing the mandolin, which enables us as the viewer to see the profile of her face, whilst the rest of her body directly faces forward.
As you trace out the outline of the figure, it keeps running into a confusion of the foreground and the background as there appears to be not one but several figures, as they fluctuate in and out of vision, like an optical illusion.
A year after painting A Girl with Mandolin in 1910, Picasso soon painted Man with a Mandolin, which is one of his largest cubist figures and one of two that shows the full length of the figure. As the composition is a long tall format. Picasso has purposely left the lower third of this painting schematically outlined, in contrast to the upper two-thirds which are of pictorial construction.
However, the pieces (Figure 3) appear to be incomplete, whether it was trial pieces or if they were left unfinished on purpose. But (figure 4) depicts the same image as (figure 3) with the same title and it was completed in the same year 1911, indicating that it could have been a trial piece for his next cubist work. In (figure 4) Picasso followed in Braque’s footsteps in depicting his habit of incidental detail the surroundings of the figure whilst leaving the figure itself schematically indicated. What helped Picasso create different levels of depth in this work, is that he carefully painted decorative details such as the chair (center right), the drapery tassel (center left), and the fringed edge of a wrought-iron table that Picasso had kept in his studio at the time.
Comparing these two works to A Girl with a Mandolin, it is visible that in 1911 Picasso was in the analytic cubism style more deeply than he was in 1910 as his figures are much more disconnected and distorted and harder to depict as a whole, while in A Girl with a Mandolin the figure is not as distorted but still has geometric components.
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