by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Introduction
At first glance, Pablo Picasso's “Ma Jolie” may seem to offer little more than interlocking brown and grey planes. Look longer and a woman with a musical instrument begins to emerge: a group of strings near the centre, an angled arm, suggestions of a head and hand. At the bottom of the canvas Picasso added a treble clef and the words “MA JOLIE.” The phrase, meaning “my pretty one,” connects a popular song to the name he used for Eva Gouel, also known as Marcelle Humbert. The painting brings a private reference into a demanding public experiment in how a picture can represent a person.[1][2]
The work discussed here is the vertical oil on canvas in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, object 176.1945. MoMA dates it to Paris in the winter of 1911–12 and records its size as 100 by 64.5 centimetres. It is sometimes described as Woman with a Guitar or Woman with a Zither or Guitar. Other Picasso works also contain the phrase Ma Jolie, including a later painting in Indianapolis. Distinguishing them matters: this page concerns MoMA's early Cubist image in which a near-hidden woman and a plainly written declaration share the same surface.[1][2][8]
At a Glance
- Type: Cubist painting of a woman and musical instrument
- Work: MoMA, New York, 176.1945; winter 1911–12
- Inscription: A treble clef and the words MA JOLIE
- Personal association: The phrase was also Picasso’s name for Eva Gouel
Ma Jolie in Picasso's career
First Communion
1896Ma Jolie
winter 1911–12Three Musicians
1921Las Meninas series
1957The highlighted work is dated with the qualifications explained in the sources on this page. The other works are selective points of comparison, not the start or end of a style.
Contents
- Finding the woman and guitar
- Why the words matter
- Cubism without a formula
- Eva Gouel and the Paris moment
- Other works called Ma Jolie
- From Kahnweiler to MoMA
- Reading the whole picture
Finding the woman and guitar
The figure does not stand before a background in the familiar way. Lines, shaded planes and small changes of tone cover the canvas from edge to edge. A darker structure gathers toward the middle while paler passages interrupt it. The head has no complete, smoothly modelled face. Instead, the viewer moves between possible parts, looking for a body that refuses to settle into one outline. The difficulty is deliberate, but it is not a puzzle with a single key that makes every shape suddenly transparent.[1][2]
MoMA points to six vertical lines in the central area as the strings of a guitar. A triangle to the right can be read as an elbow. In its fuller study of the painting, the museum also suggests a bent arm, a hand near the instrument and a wine glass at the left. Some of these identifications are necessarily tentative. The painting gives clues to familiar things while shifting their edges into other planes. Once the strings are noticed, the entire picture need not become an accurate diagram of a guitar.[1][2]
This is what makes the conventional subject newly strange. An artist had long been able to paint a woman making music by showing a face, hands and instrument in a room. Picasso keeps enough signs for the subject to survive but denies the single viewpoint that would make it instantly legible. The body seems to pass into its surroundings; the instrument can be read as part of that body and as a separate object. Looking becomes an active process of testing relationships rather than recognising an already assembled scene.[1][2]
The restricted colour helps hold this process together. Browns, blacks, greys and warm ochres recur across figure and ground. A brighter patch need not belong to a single object; a dark edge can define one plane and then lose its function a few inches away. MoMA's 1972 catalogue describes the work as pictorial architecture, with a loose structure of verticals and horizontals supporting the more elusive forms. The comparison does not mean the picture represents a building. It names the way parts of the image are constructed and related on the flat canvas.[2]
There are also passages where shading hints at depth while the flat shape remains visible. A plane may look as if it turns away from us, then stop at an abrupt straight edge. These cues do not add up to a room measured in normal perspective. They allow two experiences at once: the eye senses volume, yet repeatedly returns to paint laid on a surface. Early Cubism could use the materials of illusion without allowing illusion to take full control.[2][4]
Why the words matter
The phrase at the bottom is easier to read than the figure above it. MoMA's 2019 gallery label calls attention to that contrast. Where the woman's body is broken into hard-to-follow facets, the letters announce themselves as ordinary language. They work almost like a title written inside the artwork, but they are also painted shapes. They occupy a position, have a scale and alter the balance of the composition. Their legibility does not stand outside the Cubist experiment; it sharpens it.[1]
The treble clef and nearby notation point toward music, as do the instrument strings. Ma jolie was a refrain in a song heard in Parisian entertainment venues. Those clues justify hearing an allusion to popular music when looking at the painting. They do not establish that Picasso assigned each repeated plane to a note, translated the song's pitch into a geometric sequence or intended the canvas as a playable score. The visible connection is between painted signs, words and the subject of a musician.[1][2]
The same phrase also carried an intimate meaning. MoMA identifies it as Picasso's name for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. The Musée national Picasso-Paris describes the phrase as a recurring written homage in his Cubist paintings during their relationship. That double use makes the lettering unusually fertile: someone who knew the popular song could read one reference; someone who knew Picasso's private life might recognise another. Neither requires the barely visible figure to have a photographically recognisable face.[1][5][6]
The museum says this canvas was the first of at least twelve works on which Picasso wrote the phrase. It is tempting to treat the inscription as a guarantee that Eva posed for the painting and that every part of the fragmented body records her features. The evidence supports a more careful reading. The text links the work to her; the subject is a woman with a guitar or zither; the face is substantially abstracted. MoMA's object description does not identify a specific sitting, and the Paris museum later singles out a different 1914 canvas as a work inspired by Eva's face. “Ma Jolie” is a personal image without being a conventional likeness.[1][5]
The language may even make the concealed image more affecting. “My pretty one” offers the easy clarity of a familiar term of endearment, while the woman it appears to name remains difficult to see. The viewer can read the affection before locating the person. That contrast is a possible interpretation of the picture's effect, not a claim about Eva's own response or a coded statement whose full meaning Picasso left for us to decode.[1][2]
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Watch on YouTubeCubism without a formula
“Ma Jolie” belongs to what is often called Analytic Cubism, the intensive exploration of fractured forms and restricted colour developed by Picasso and Georges Braque around these years. The two artists worked in close dialogue, a relationship documented in the Museu Picasso Barcelona's chronology. MoMA's catalogue places this canvas near a point at which their paintings approached a high degree of abstraction while still holding onto traces of the external world.[2][7]
“Analytic” can suggest that Picasso first took a complete woman and guitar, broke them apart and then scattered the pieces. That shorthand misses the constructive side of the painting. The canvas is not a photograph damaged into fragments. It is built from overlapping tones, edges and marks that suggest several aspects of a subject without presenting a single stable view. The viewer's eye moves from string to arm to letter and back, assembling and revising a provisional understanding.[1][2]
Nor is every passage simply an illustration of “multiple perspectives.” A visible change of viewpoint helps explain some Cubist effects, but the words and treble clef cannot be reduced to that principle. They introduce things known through reading and hearing into a field dominated by uncertain sight. A guitar string is at once a line in a painting and a sign of an instrument. The work combines kinds of knowledge: visual resemblance, language, notation and private association.[1][2]
This mixture differentiates “Ma Jolie” from a purely abstract composition. The woman's body is difficult to recover, not erased without remainder. MoMA's 1972 analysis locates possible fingers and a bent arm; its current record keeps the guitar strings and elbow as points of orientation. The painting allows those readings and then makes the viewer doubt their boundaries. The subject is both present and unstable, which is more interesting than declaring that Cubism abandoned subjects altogether.[1][2]
The muted palette also has no single secret meaning. It lets small tonal differences and planar shifts carry a great deal of work. Darker marks can draw attention to a contour; light areas can make an edge seem to come forward. It would be unwarranted to say Picasso chose each brown to represent one musical pitch or an emotion assigned to Eva. The colour is a formal resource we can describe closely without forcing it into an undocumented code.[1][2]
An early viewer's notes make the difficulty historically tangible. The Czech collector Vincenc Kramář wrote about Picasso's work in connection with a 1913 exhibition; the Met's archive identifies his discussion of Woman with a Guitar (“Ma Jolie”). He attended to the black contours and shifting, sometimes transparent planes, rather than offering a tidy inventory of body parts. His observations do not settle every disputed shape for a modern viewer, but they show that the play between material brushwork and elusive subject was noticed close to the time the painting was made. The work was challenging before later textbooks gave it a familiar place in Cubism's story.[4]
The date also locates “Ma Jolie” just before Picasso's first collages, which the Museu Picasso Barcelona places in 1912. The painting is oil on canvas, not paper pasted to a support. Its letters and musical signs do, however, make the viewer aware that a picture can bring different systems of representation together. Later pasted paper would pose that question in other materials. Reading the painting through what followed can clarify its importance, provided we do not retroactively call it a collage or assume it existed only to lead to one.[1][7]
Eva Gouel and the Paris moment
Eva Gouel was known as Marcelle Humbert and had been connected with the painter Louis Marcoussis. A Centre Pompidou chronology places the beginning of her relationship with Picasso in autumn 1911, while the Museu Picasso Barcelona's chronology marks 1912 as the point at which she became his partner after his separation from Fernande Olivier. These accounts need not describe identical milestones. The winter 1911–12 date of the MoMA canvas sits within this changing personal and artistic context.[1][6][7]
The shift should not be turned into a simple tale in which one woman replaces another as a source of style. Picasso and Braque had been developing Cubism before this relationship. The painting's visual language belongs to that longer experiment, while the words give it a particular personal resonance. Holding those facts together avoids explaining a complex method of painting entirely through a romance, or erasing Eva's name from a work in which Picasso deliberately wrote an intimate phrase.[1][5][7]
Eva herself is less fully documented in the painting's public accounts than the artist's use of her nickname. That imbalance is a reason for care. We can identify how the relationship enters the canvas and note the name's role, but we should not invent her thoughts about the work or turn an almost unreadable painted figure into evidence of her character. She was a person in the social world of 1911–12 Paris; the painting is Picasso's construction, not a transparent record of her inner life.[1][5][6]
The Paris museum describes ma jolie inscriptions continuing into later Cubist works. MoMA's The Architect's Table, painted in early 1912, includes the phrase on a piece of sheet music within a tabletop arrangement. That is a separate canvas with its own subject and composition. It shows how a short phrase could migrate from a woman's picture into a still life and still carry the double reference to music and Eva. Repetition does not make all the works interchangeable.[3][5]
Other works called Ma Jolie
The Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields owns another Ma Jolie, dated 1913–14, accession 61.36. Unlike MoMA's tall woman-with-guitar painting, it is a horizontal still life. Its collection record identifies “MAJOLIE” on a green album amid other inscriptions and objects, including a “BASS” label. The later painting belongs to a different stage of Picasso's Cubist work and has a different chain of owners. A photograph of Indianapolis's canvas cannot illustrate MoMA's object, even though both bear the same appealing phrase.[8]
The distinction is also useful for understanding Picasso's practice. In the earlier painting, words give an unusually readable foothold in a picture where the figure is elusive. In the Indianapolis still life, lettering is one among several recognisable bits distributed through a field of objects. The differences in date, orientation, subject and materials of reference matter more than the repeated title. The nickname and song were resources Picasso could use in changing pictorial problems, not a label attached to only one image.[1][3][8]
Other 1914 works have been described using Ma Jolie as part of longer still-life titles. The safe way to identify an artwork is therefore to pair its name with date, holding institution and, when available, accession number. Here that combination is MoMA, winter 1911–12, 176.1945. It prevents details of a bottle, newspaper or green album from being read into the woman-with-guitar canvas, and prevents the guitar strings and bottom treble clef from being projected onto every later work.[1][3][8]
From Kahnweiler to MoMA
The canvas's ownership history is unusually instructive. MoMA's ongoing provenance research begins with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's Paris gallery. French authorities seized his stock during the First World War, and this picture was sold at an Hôtel Drouot auction in May 1923 to the dealer Paul Guillaume. The Met's research on Guillaume independently identifies the purchase. The catalogue entry at that sale described the picture as a woman with a zither, another reminder that names shift while objects persist.[1][9]
By 1929 the painting belonged to Marcel Fleischmann in Zurich. It appeared in exhibitions and was on extended loan to MoMA from 1939 to 1945. The museum acquired it in 1945 through Paul Drey using funds generated by exchange from the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. That account is more precise than saying the Bliss family simply donated this particular canvas. It also shows why a painting made in Paris could have a complicated path through wartime seizure, dealers, private collection and an American museum.[1]
MoMA explicitly labels its provenance account a work in progress. The recorded chain gives firm landmarks, not permission to fill every unrecorded interval with an invented sale or motive. The 1913–14 Indianapolis painting has a separate provenance and was not the MoMA object sold to Guillaume in 1923. Its later owner Caroline Marmon Fesler bequeathed it to the Indianapolis institution in 1961. The two histories should remain as distinct as the canvases.[1][8][9]
Reading the whole picture
“Ma Jolie” asks its viewer to alternate between certainty and uncertainty. A phrase can be read at once; the woman to whom it may refer takes time to locate. Guitar strings imply music, but the painting does not sound. Shaded planes suggest a body, then return to the flat surface on which they were made. This is why a quick identification of the title is only the start of looking.[1][2]
The painting is neither a secret portrait that can be fully decoded nor an arbitrary pattern with a romantic anecdote attached. Its references to a woman, an instrument, a song and Eva Gouel all matter, but none cancels the freedom and difficulty of its constructed form. The most rewarding approach is to follow the few stable clues and notice where they stop being stable. To see the identified original and check its current display status, use MoMA's collection record for “Ma Jolie”[1].[1]
Discussion
Use the evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. These are editorial prompts, not reader comments.
Reader Insights
Which fragments of figure and instrument can you assemble from the planes?
How do the painted words and treble clef change what can be identified?
What does the song reference establish, and what remains personal interpretation?
Join the Conversation
Which reading best fits the evidence?
References
- The Museum of Modern Art, “Ma Jolie”, object 176.1945.
- MoMA, Picasso in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (1972), pp. 68–69.
- MoMA, The Architect's Table, early 1912.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913 Vincenc Kramář notes on Cubist paintings.
- Musée national Picasso-Paris, Le Peintre et son modèle, French.
- Centre Pompidou, Picasso chronology, French.
- Museu Picasso Barcelona, Picasso chronology, Catalan.
- Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Ma Jolie, object 61.36.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, research entry on Paul Guillaume.
Image Credits
- Pierre Dubreuil (original photograph); Rijksmuseum (digitisation). CC0. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Resized to 1024px; no crop. Source record. Licence.
