Image: Wikimedia Commons — see source licensing
View source →Card Player
Pablo Picasso, 1913–1914
Technical Details
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
108 × 89.5 cm (42.5 × 35.2 in)
Style
Synthetic Cubism
Decade
1910s
About This Work
In Card Player, Picasso builds the figure from large, flat, brightly colored shapes whose overlaps recall cut paper. The seated player remains legible, but body, cards, table, and surrounding space are assembled as interlocking planes rather than modeled as a continuous illusion. The 108 × 89.5 cm canvas invites attention to the tension between a familiar subject and a deliberately constructed surface: fragments of color and contour create a decorative rhythm while preserving the concentrated act of play.
MoMA dates Card Player to Paris in the winter of 1913–14 and identifies it as an oil on canvas in its Painting and Sculpture collection. The work belongs to the period in which Picasso moved from the dense fragmentation of Analytic Cubism toward more emphatic, legible shapes and color relationships. Its card-game motif offers a compact everyday scene through which those formal changes can be tested: recognition is never abandoned, but it depends on the viewer’s active reconstruction of the image.
Current Location
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA
Public Collection — Open to visitors
Visit museum website →Valuation & Provenance
2026 Estimated Value
$40–70 million (est.)
* Estimates are based on comparable auction results and market analysis. Not a formal appraisal.
Last Known Sale
No public auction record — held in permanent museum collection
Keywords
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