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10. Pablo Picasso, Guitar, 1912
In 1912, Picasso created a cardboard maquette of a piece that would have an outsized impact on 20th-century art. Also in MoMA’s collection, it depicted a guitar, a subject Picasso often explored in painting and collage, and in many respects, Guitar transferred collage’s cut and paste techniques from two dimensions to three. It did the same for Cubism, as well, by assembling flat shapes to create a multifaceted form with both depth and volume. Picasso’s innovation was to eschew the conventional carving and modeling of a sculpture out of a solid mass. Instead, Guitar was fastened together like a structure. This idea would reverberate from Russian Constructivism down to Minimalism and beyond. Two years after making the Guitar in cardboard, Picasso created this version in snipped tin.

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