The most expensive guitars in the world have sold for millions of dollars, yet they look like a steal in comparison to the prices paid for art featuring guitars.
They’re impressive prices but pale next to the $37.1 million paid for Picasso’s Guitare sur une table (Guitar on a table) in November 2022 or the $28.64 million paid for Juan Gris’ Violon et guitare (violin and guitar) painting in 2010. Another two guitar paintings were sold at auction for more than $12 million and a third for more than $9 million.
Many of these are examples of cubism – the abstract art-form that revolutionized painting and sculpture in the 20th century by breaking up and reassembling objects, rendering them from multiple viewpoints. Guitars and violins make regular appearances in cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris.
What is it about the nature of art that attracts greater value than the subject of the art? A guitar has a practical purpose whereas art has none but to unravel that contradiction is best left to unravel for some lonely philosopher.
Picasso’s Guitar on a Table sold for $37.1 million – well above the expected $25 million – in late-2022 at a Sotheby’s auction. The guitar was always central to Picasso’s work, but became emblematic during his Cubist period, which transformed everyday objects such as musical instruments, fruit bowls and bottles in compositions that broke them into multiple and overlapping viewpoints. The painting was part of the personal collection of CBS founder William S. Paley and was housed in the New York Museum of Modern Art for many years.
Juan Gris is the guitarists’ favorite cubist. It’s said the painter would break down in tears when he heard the strumming of Spanish guitars.
Typically, you have to peer closely to see the guitar in this masterpiece painted in 1913 in Paris. The violin – split into three components – dominates the upper portion of the painting while the guitar sits at the base.
Gris considered this painting his masterpiece.
It was sold through auction house Christie’s in November 2010 amid heated bidding that also saw a posthumously cast Matisse bronze sell for a record $48.8 million.
Christie’s international head of the Impressionist and Modern art department, Thomas Seydoux, told the New York Times after the auction that even he didn’t think Gris’ Violon et guitare painting would sell for such a level (although it was justified given the high end of its estimate was $25 million).
This 18th century masterpiece is tiny (14½ x 11½ in (36.3 x 28.2 cm)) but sold for a staggering £12.3 million in 2008, well above its estimate of £3 to £5 million.
Its price was perhaps helped by the fact this famous painting was assumed lost for much of the preceding two centuries until a private collector brought it to public attention in 2007.
The painting depicts an actor from the Comédie Italienne, dressed as the character Mezzetin, with his guitar, while a couple seated beside him are in a passionate embrace.
If you look closely at the painting, you can see Mezzetin is tuning his guitar rather than serenading the couple. I respect that. But the guitar itself is a guitar in name more than form. This was painted well before Torres standardized the classical guitar form in the 19th century.
Picasso juxtaposed the guitar and fruit-bowl in many paintings, including this example in 1924. It sold at the low end of an estimated $12 to $16 million in 2008. The guitar was a popular instrument in his Spanish homeland but (even then) also evoked sex, which Picasso exploited in his paintings.
Auction house Christie’s, which sold the painting, quotes Robert Rosenblum’s view on Picasso’s relationship with the instrument: “The anthropomorphic potential of the guitar… recommended it especially to a quick-change magician who could sometimes recreate it as a female nude (in Spanish popular culture, playing a guitar is often equated with love-making) or as a more stiffly geometric male presence that might even be another of Picasso’s alter egos…”
This passionate work showing two intertwined lovers was painted when Picasso was 88 and in declining health. It somehow attracted a stunning near-$10 million price tag in May 2011.
The artist’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, called it an “unleashing of sexual passions” that had been influenced by the Surrealists the painter rubbed shoulders with.
“The colors of blood and death are omnipresent and oppressive. You can hardly avoid associating the dominant red of Picasso’s signature with the red nail polish of Jacqueline, the companion of his final years.”
The guitar wasn’t mentioned by auction house Sotheby’s.
Another one of the great cubist artist’s paintings sold for the bargain price of just $9.125 million, below the expected $10 to $15 million at an auction in 2013. The roundness of the guitar’s shape is often used as a classic foil to the angular syntax of the cubist form.
Unlike Violon et guitare, the guitar takes precedence in this painting: a shaft of light through an opened door illuminates its face, two sheets of music paper, and a section of molding on the wall behind.
At first glance, it can be hard to see the guitar in Guitare, which sold for more than $6.5 million at Sotheby’s auction in November 2008. But there it is – the body of the guitar represented by the deep yellow element in the centre overlapped by strings – a classic synthetic Cubist picture of a guitar.
