Mother and Child
1921
Oil on Canvas, 56.5" x 64" (143.5 x 162.6cm)
A monument of Picasso's own brand of neoclassicism.  Taking a stale and shopworn pictorial idiom.  Picasso creates a new style by simple pictorial means – earth-colored, broadly brushed drawing.  One seems reminiscences of Etruscan mirrors, Greek ceramics and Hellenistic sculpture.  The painting originally included a bearded father to the viewer's left.  Picasso eventually cut the figure out in order to allow for an intense concentration on mother and child, and later presented the fragment to the Art Institute.

Man with a Pipe
Oil on Canvas, 51.25 x 35.25 (130.3 x 89.5 cm)
Picasso's experiments with collage are exemplified in this picture, in which pieces of wood, wire, paper, and string are distorted by the artist into a flat composition.  The austerity of feeling evoked in Picasso's earlier works in Analytic Cubism is abandoned in this second Cubist phase – often called "Synthetic Cubism – in which his forms are synthesized and reduced to basic element and shapes all in terms of soft, but ravishing color.

The Old Guitarist
Oil on Panel, 1903
122.9 x 82.6 cm
No artist has dominated the 20th century in the way Pablo Picasso has.  This extraordinarily gifted Spanish artist, working most of his life in France, produced a voluminous body of work in a variety of styles that influenced nearly every major trend of the first half of the 20th century.  When Picasso painted The Old Guitarist in 2903, the young and struggling artist was following in the footsteps of Toulouse-Lautrec and other modern artists.  His subjects were society's outcasts, lonely figures whom he rendered in an all-pervasive blue that creates a melancholy mood.

Guitar and Violin
Oil on Canvas, Circa 1912
65.5 x 54.3 cm