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
Pablo Picasso painted two large works called Three Musicians in the summer of 1921. One belongs to The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the other is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They share a shallow stage, a table and three masked music-makers, but the characters change places and instruments. If the harlequin in diamonds is at the centre, you are looking at the New York picture. If he is at the left, with a violin, you are looking at the Philadelphia picture. Both are oil paintings whose hard-edged colours look as though pieces of paper have been fitted together. Neither is literally a pasted-paper collage. [1][2][3]
The pair was made in Fontainebleau, not Paris, while Picasso worked in a garage converted into a studio. Historic photographs place the two canvases on opposite walls. They are important not only for their playful figures but for the way they revisit Cubism on a monumental scale. The first Cubist collages lay almost a decade behind Picasso; in 1921 he could make their flat visual devices as theatrical, solemn and surprising as he wished. [3][4]
At a Glance
- Made: Summer 1921
- Two versions: One at MoMA, New York; one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Spot the difference: MoMA: Harlequin centre with guitar; Philadelphia: left with violin
Three Musicians in Picasso's career
First Communion
1896Three Musicians
1921Guernica
1937Las 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
- How are the two Three Musicians paintings different?
- Who are Pierrot, Harlequin and the monk?
- Why do the paintings look like collages if they are oil on canvas?
- Why did Picasso paint two versions in Fontainebleau?
- Did Picasso intend a farewell to Cubism?
- Where can the two Three Musicians paintings be seen?
How are the two Three Musicians paintings different?
The MoMA version measures 200.7 × 222.9 centimetres. A white-costumed Pierrot plays a clarinet at the left; a brightly patterned Harlequin strums a guitar in the centre; and a dark-robed monk appears to sing from a sheet of music at the right. A dog hides in the brown shapes beneath the table. The interior is dark and boxlike, with the most concentrated colours and overlapping forms near the centre. MoMA's collection number is 55.1949. [1]
Philadelphia's canvas is almost as tall but narrower, at 204.5 × 188.3 centimetres. Here the order changes: Harlequin is on the left, Pierrot in the middle, and the monk at the right. The museum describes Harlequin as a violinist, Pierrot as playing a clarinet or recorder, and the monk as playing an accordion. The space is lighter and more open in colour, although the bodies are still assembled from abrupt, angular planes. It entered the Philadelphia collection through A. E. Gallatin's collection in 1952. [2][5]
This is more than a neat spot-the-difference exercise. Picasso did not simply make a copy and shuffle the men like pieces on a board. The move of Harlequin from middle to side changes the balance of colour and of our attention. In the New York picture the three performers press close to the centre, with the masked Pierrot partly swallowed by the dark room. In the Philadelphia version the left-hand Harlequin announces his diamond costume at once, while the white central figure acts as a bright division between him and the monk. The instruments change with them. Each painting therefore has its own rhythm and visual pressure. [1][2][3]
The similarity of the titles often causes confusion. A print of one painting is not a third original, and a detail copied from one version cannot stand for both. The two museum records are the safest starting points for identifying the works. Viewers can then look for the left-to-centre exchange of Harlequin and Pierrot, the violin versus guitar, and the unusually hidden dog in MoMA's version. [1][2]
Who are Pierrot, Harlequin and the monk?
Pierrot and Harlequin come from the world of European comic theatre, especially the Italian commedia dell'arte and the traditions that followed it. Pierrot is commonly the melancholy, pale-costumed figure; Harlequin the quick, disruptive character in a patterned suit. Picasso had drawn and painted harlequins and other performers for years, including in his Rose Period and the Family of Saltimbanques. Their costumes make the three musicians legible as performers even though Picasso breaks faces, clothes and instruments into flat shapes. [1][2]
The third figure complicates the cast. A monk is not one of the standard pair of commedia characters, yet he occupies the right side in both canvases. His hood or robe becomes a dark frame for a face and an instrument or score. In MoMA's work he holds a sheet of music; in Philadelphia's description he plays an accordion. He belongs to the band while remaining visibly different from his theatrical companions. [1][2]
Picasso's recent stage work offers one context. He designed sets and costumes for productions by the Ballets Russes, including the 1920 ballet Pulcinella. Philadelphia's museum relates the costumes of Three Musicians to those designs. The resemblance does not mean these three figures reproduce a specific scene from the ballet. It places the paintings among Picasso's ongoing experiments with theatrical masks, performers and stage-like space, explored further in the theatre and ballet guide. Here the musicians appear to face us, as though the room itself were a small theatre, but no curtain rises and no performance can be heard. [2][6]
There is also a widely discussed personal reading. Harlequin can stand in for Picasso; Pierrot has been associated with his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918; and the monk with another poet friend, Max Jacob, who entered a Benedictine monastery in 1921. Both MoMA and Philadelphia discuss versions of this interpretation. It can make the trio feel like a gathering of friends, one living, one dead and one withdrawn into religious life. But it is an interpretation of masks and memories, not a documented sitting at which three men posed as these exact characters. [7][8]
The distinction leaves room for the works' other meanings. A viewer who knows nothing of Apollinaire or Jacob can still read the paintings as a surprising ensemble of contrasting figures. A viewer who knows Picasso's friendships can feel the possibility of an elegy beneath the comic surface. These are not mutually exclusive responses. Masks can hide identities and invoke them at the same time, which is part of their power here. [1][2][7]
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Watch on YouTubeWhy do the paintings look like collages if they are oil on canvas?
Both museums catalogue their Three Musicians as oil on canvas. Picasso did not paste the visible scraps of colour onto these large supports. Instead, he painted sharp-edged shapes that behave visually like cut and layered pieces of paper. A mask may seem to sit in front of a hood, a sleeve in front of an instrument, and a sliver of background between two parts of a face. The eye keeps assembling the shapes into people, then noticing that the assembly will not hold in only one way. [1][2]
This method recalls Synthetic Cubism. In 1912 Picasso and Georges Braque began using fragments of paper and other found material in Cubist works. The Cubism guide follows the wider movement, while the collage and assemblage guide examines the pasted materials. A newspaper cutting could be both a literal piece of printed paper and part of a pictured café table. By 1921 Picasso had a rich language of flat planes, signs and overlapping edges at his disposal. Three Musicians transfers something of that collage logic to large painted canvases. It is a return to an earlier formal discovery, but not a simple repetition: the shapes now make whole stage figures taller than most viewers. [1][3]
The painted sheet music in MoMA's picture is a particularly witty example. It looks like an object held by the monk and a rectangular field of marks within the composition. It also recalls the actual printed scores Picasso had attached to earlier Cubist collages. Yet the score here is part of an oil painting. We should not assume that it transcribes a known melody or that the band could perform the impossible arrangement of painted fragments exactly as shown. The canvas evokes music through hands, instruments, notation and rhythm of shapes rather than by supplying a playable piece. [1]
MoMA describes its version's overlapping forms as a dense, puzzle-like construction. One can begin with the big divisions—dark walls, table, three vertical bodies—and then discover smaller exchanges: a contour switches between sleeve and background; a face emerges from a mask; the dog appears only when apparently stray brown passages are joined. Philadelphia's account emphasises comparable ambiguities in planes that seem paper-thin but fit together inconsistently. The inconsistent fit is purposeful. It keeps us conscious that a painting can build a scene without obeying a single, stable account of depth. [1][2]
The difference in mood is equally worth noting. A carnival costume might promise merriment, but MoMA's dark background and frontal, imposing figures feel more solemn than a light comedy. Philadelphia's clearer patches of orange, yellow and white do not dissolve the mystery: its three men remain stiff and masked, their music suspended in paint. Picasso gives them the outward equipment of entertainment while withholding a normal scene of performers moving before an audience. [1][2]
Why did Picasso paint two versions in Fontainebleau?
Picasso spent roughly July to September 1921 in Fontainebleau, southeast of Paris, with a rented villa and an adjoining garage that he used as a studio. Researchers studying photographs and records of that temporary space have established that he worked on the two Three Musicians canvases there. In one documented arrangement the Philadelphia painting stood beside a large, very different work called Three Women at the Spring; the New York musicians faced them across the room. The paintings were physically close enough for Picasso to see the contrasts he was making. [3][4]
It is tempting to ask which Three Musicians is the finished version and which is the rehearsal. The surviving evidence does not require that hierarchy. Photographs show the works in progress and in relation to one another, but do not provide an unbroken day-by-day order of each change. The paintings share a subject and a scale while solving it differently. Treating Philadelphia merely as a draft for New York, or the reverse, would suppress the expressive choices specific to each. [3][4]
The neighbouring Three Women at the Spring makes the summer still more striking. In that work, Picasso painted monumental figures with an interest in classical sculptural mass. Beside and opposite them he used Cubism's cut-looking planes for the musicians. The Musée national Picasso-Paris's French chronology records the two Cubist Three Musicians and the two classicising Three Women as products of the same Fontainebleau period. MoMA's later study sees this coexistence as a challenge to a tidy story in which one Picasso style must replace another. He could work through different visual systems in the same months and within the same room. [3][9]
One archival photograph preserved by the Musée national Picasso-Paris shows Olga Picasso beside a Three Musicians canvas in progress at the Fontainebleau address. It is a reminder that these mural-sized works were not abstract exercises invented in a vacuum: they occupied a real workspace and changed as Picasso worked. The photograph does not, by itself, tell us why he made a pair or how he decided every final contour. It is strongest as evidence that the painting had a material, staged process in the studio. [10]
Did Picasso intend a farewell to Cubism?
Philadelphia's collection account describes its canvas as looking back at and saying farewell to a phase of Picasso's career. That is one useful curatorial way of reading the work's scale and retrospective quality. But a painting cannot issue a simple written announcement that the artist will never use Cubist methods again; Picasso continued to move among visual approaches. The Fontainebleau evidence points more securely to simultaneous variety than to a single chronological break. [2][3][9]
The large size may be one reason the paintings feel conclusive. Synthetic Cubist devices first tested in smaller collages now organise stage-like canvases around two metres high. A viewer is confronted by three characters almost at human scale. Their instruments are symbols of sound, but also shapes arranged for the eye. The old theatre characters bring a long cultural past into a visual language associated with modernity. That combination can suggest summing up without proving Picasso intended a final goodbye. [1][2][3]
The friendship interpretation can add another kind of looking back. If Harlequin recalls Picasso, Pierrot Apollinaire and the monk Jacob, the trio gathers people no longer together in the way they had been before the First World War. Yet that reading remains layered on top of the paintings' more immediate theatrical and formal qualities. The work need not be forced to choose between a concert, a memorial and an experiment in painted collage. Its strength lies in keeping those registers available. [7][8]
Where can the two Three Musicians paintings be seen?
The wider, darker canvas is at MoMA, New York. The narrower canvas with Harlequin playing violin at the left is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Museum displays and loans change, so the respective collection records should be checked before planning a visit. The institutions' online views also make it possible to compare the two objects directly without confusing either one with a later print, poster or product reproduction. [1][2]
Their separation into two collections is a later chapter of the story, not how Picasso first encountered them. MoMA announced its acquisition through the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund in 1949. Philadelphia credits its canvas to the A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952. For decades, most viewers could see only one version at a time, and printed reproductions could make them look interchangeable. The institutions' object records, and the research that reunited them for comparison at MoMA's 2023–24 Fontainebleau exhibition, restore the pair to the shared working context they once had across Picasso's small garage studio. They also make their different proportions and placements of the performers easier to grasp. [1][2][3][5][11]
This matters to the interpretation. In isolation, the New York canvas can look like the final statement of a single subject, with its buried dog and dense central overlap. Beside knowledge of Philadelphia's version, it becomes one answer to a question Picasso put twice. The Philadelphia painting is no less resolved because its Harlequin has changed place; it makes a different distribution of colour, instruments and attention. A comparison should preserve each as a complete original work, not make one a minor variation of the other. [1][2][3]
What makes Three Musicians memorable is finally the question the pair asks of looking itself. Two paintings can share a title, three performers and a Cubist vocabulary while producing distinct encounters. We may follow a clarinet, a violin, a guitar, an accordion or a painted score, but we also follow patches of colour that will not stay in one visual role. The musicians face us; their music exists only as an imaginative possibility. In Fontainebleau, Picasso made that possibility twice, turning both canvases into a conversation between theatre and painting, memory and invention, repetition and change. [1][2][3]
Discussion
Use the evidence and your own close looking to explain your view. These are editorial prompts, not reader comments.
Reader Insights
Where is the Harlequin in the New York version, and where in Philadelphia’s?
How can flat colour feel like assembled paper without making the oils collages?
What do the two versions reveal that one reproduction cannot?
Join the Conversation
Which reading best fits the evidence?
References
The Museum of Modern Art, Three Musicians, object 55.1949, with object data, 2024 gallery label and commentary.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Three Musicians, object 53963, collection interpretation and image-rights notice.
The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso in Fontainebleau exhibition introduction, 2023; and Anne Umland, “Picasso in Fontainebleau: An Introduction”, 2023, drawing on archival photographs and exhibition-catalogue research.
The Museum of Modern Art, curator audio comparing the two canvases in the reconstructed Fontainebleau studio, 2023.
MoMA, Picasso in Fontainebleau exhibition checklist, 2023, documenting the Philadelphia dimensions and Gallatin credit.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Three Musicians object account, on the Pulcinella costume connection.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris exhibition account, on the proposed Picasso–Apollinaire–Jacob reading.
MoMA, curator Anne Umland on Three Musicians, on the figures' possible biographical associations.
Musée national Picasso-Paris, French Picasso chronology, 1921 entry.
Musée national Picasso-Paris, archival photograph of Olga Picasso beside Les trois musiciens in progress, APPH6461.
Image Credits
- Juan Gris. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Resized proportionally to 1024px wide; no crop. Source record. Licence.
