Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso's conceptual path reveals a will for constant experimentation, attentive to the plastic conscience of his time and the fruit of the avant-garde artistic movements he came into contact in Paris. Cubism, Futurism, Abstractionism, and Expressionism are some of the new aesthetic proposals to which the painter adhered more or less experimentally and explored at different stages of his production.

This drawing, which the artist's signature and the type of composition allow to be dated to around 1916, was probably executed after his return to Portugal, a period when he resumed and deepened his experiments around the questions posed by cubism. The citation to this movement is evident both in the referent chosen - a guitar, an instrument that appears regularly in Amadeo's works, and which constitutes one of the privileged themes of Cubist iconography -, and in the compositional organisation, marked by deconstruction and formal schematisation. Although it is possible to recognise the theme, which is reinforced by the integration of some musical symbols, the composition is free of narrative.

The configuration of space develops vertically from the identifiable components of the guitar - the body, the arm, the strings - which in turn are confused and interact with the geometric elements that populate the composition. Despite the announcement of volumes conferred by more or less subtle modelling of chiaroscuro and the geometrization and deconstruction of forms that insinuates a dynamic interaction between the various planes, the articulation of the figure with the background blur the suggestions of perspective. The harmony of the whole is conferred by the general aggregation of the several elements, despite the apparent imbalance caused by the empty space of the enigmatic interrupted rope design that dominates the right side of the composition.