If you are going to be in New York before June 6th (or can get there), then make some time to see Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914, at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition covers Picasso’s guitar-themed work beginning with Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe from the fall of 1912, oil on canvas work with the feel of a collage. Later in the fall of 1912, Picasso created Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, a collage of newspaper, sheet music and painted paper. Guitar from early 1913 is a Cubist collage which hints at a guitar.

A century ago Picasso’s work made a lot of people angry; it was seen as proof of the decline of European culture – foreign to the concepts of “real” art – beauty and idealism.

A paperboard guitar and a later metal version of it are the center points of the exhibit. Picasso never exhibited it during his lifetime. On his death in 1973 he left it to MoMA.

The exhibit includes about seventy collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings, and photographs from more than thirty collections worldwide, some of these pieces may never be exhibited publicly again.

View a slideshow of the exhibit at http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/11/arts/design/20110211-picasso.html