From Museum of Modern Art, New York:
The three musicians and dog conjure a bygone period of bohemian life, enjoyed here by Picasso in the guise of a Harlequin flanked by two figures who may represent poet-friends of the artist: Guillaume Apollinaire, who had recently died, and Max Jacob. The patterned flatness of the work is derived from cut-and-pasted paper, and stands in stark contrast to the sculptural monumentality of Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring, also painted in the summer of 1921.