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©Pablo Picasso - 1924 Mandolin and Guitar

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From The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation:
One year before Picasso painted the monumental still life Mandolin and Guitar, Cubism’s demise was announced during a Dada soiree in Paris by an audience member who shouted that 'Picasso [was] dead on the field of battle'; the evening ended in a riot, which could be quelled only by the arrival of the police. Picasso’s subsequent series of nine vibrantly colored still lifes (1924–25), executed in a bold Synthetic Cubist style of overlapping and contiguous forms, discredited such a judgment and asserted the enduring value of the technique. But the artist was not simply resuscitating his previous discoveries in creating this new work; the rounded, organic shapes and saturated hues attest to his appreciation of contemporary developments in Surrealist painting, particularly as evinced in the work of André Masson and Joan Miró. The undulating lines, ornamental patterns, and broad chromatic elements of Mandolin and Guitar foretell the emergence of a fully evolved sensual, biomorphic style in Picasso’s art, which would soon celebrate the presence of his new mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.