Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier)

Picasso painted Girl with a Mandolin late in the spring of 1910, shortly before leaving Paris for the Catalan town of Cadaqués. It was a response to Woman with a Mandolin, a more abstract treatment of the same theme by his friend Georges Braque, and followed two other works by Picasso under the same title. It has been analysed as a partial move away from naturalism, though comparatively legible and close to the visible form by contrast with later Cubist works, and as an important step in Picasso's movement towards focusing on the study of geometric planes. It has also been interpreted both as a de-eroticised nude and as containing autoerotic implications. The art historian T. J. Clark called it "the most ingenious of Picasso's portraits".

The painting was owned by Picasso's German-born friend Wilhelm Uhde. It was exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913, and confiscated by the French state during the First World War as "enemy property". Its later owners included the art dealer Paul Rosenberg, the poet André Breton, and Picasso's friend Roland Penrose. Penrose sold it to Nelson Rockefeller, the future Vice President of the United States, who bequeathed it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; it has been held there since Rockefeller's death in 1979.