Girl With Mandolin

According to John Golding, Pablo Picasso's 1910 rendition of Fanny Tellier entitled "Girl with Mandolin," is "not only one of the most beautiful, lyrical and accessible of all Cubist paintings, but is also a valuable document of the period." Golding's comment points to the historical significance of Picasso's development of the cubist style during the early twentieth century, a style that he and fellow artist Georges Braque popularized through their deft talents with brush and canvas. "Girl with Mandolin" signifies the early stages of cubism, when the style first emerged in the art world.

Also known as analytical cubism, this early phase introduced some of the philosophies underlying the movement: the wish to rend images into their essential parts, to show objects from various angles and perspectives, and to draw attention to the primacy of visual perception in art. Picasso, though, has denounced the peculiarity of cubism,...
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