Two versions, two cities

The two giants Picasso painted that summer went their separate ways. One hangs today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; this one, the Philadelphia version, came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the collection of the American collector A. E. Gallatin, who had earlier shown it at his Museum of Living Art — a gallery at New York University where students could see modern painting, for free, before America had quite decided it counted. The two are not quite twins: in the New York version the Harlequin and Pierrot trade places and instruments, and the whole picture runs darker.

As a summing-up, it was also a goodbye. After 1921 Picasso largely moved on — into Surrealism (the art of dreams and the unconscious), into the monsters of the 1930s, into Guernica — and Cubism as a living movement was finished. But it had already won the argument. The flat planes, the multiple viewpoints, the glued and faked paper, the idea that a picture is an object you build rather than a window you look through: all of it had passed into the bloodstream of modern art, where it remains. Three Musicians is the curtain call of arguably the most consequential decade in twentieth-century painting — and the band, masked and silent, takes its bow.