Painted like cut paper

Picasso painted Three Musicians twice that summer, in two enormous versions at once — this one, now in Philadelphia, and a near-twin now in New York. Each is over six feet tall. After a decade of small, brown, muttering Cubist canvases, these are loud: big, flat fields of orange, white, black and blue, snapped together along hard edges.

And here is the lovely circularity of it. The whole picture is built to look like collage — like sheets of brightly colored paper cut into shapes and pasted down, the technique Picasso himself had invented nine years earlier with a scrap of oilcloth. Except not one piece of it is glued. It is all paint, brushed to imitate the look of pasting. Cubism had gone from gluing real paper to faking the look of glued paper — illusion, abstraction and collage chasing each other in a circle. This is what art historians mean by Synthetic Cubism: building a figure up from flat, simple, assembled shapes rather than breaking a real one down into facets.