
One version is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City the other version is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. However, Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu in 1918, while Jacob decided to enter a monastery in 1921. Apollinaire and Jacob, both poets, had been close friends of Picasso during the 1910s. The Harlequin believed to represent Picasso, the Pierrot Guillaume Apollinaire, and the monk Max Jacob, respectively. In the second painting, Pierrot and Harlequin have changed places, with the monk remaining to their right. Synthetic Cubist works use multiple forms of representation, combining the abstracted forms of Analytic Cubism with color, collage, and even sometimes. The dog is mostly hidden, but his tail is shown between the Harlequin’s legs, his body under the Pierrot's pants, and 2 front legs on the left side.

The more famous version features a Pierrot on the left with a clarinet, a Harlequin in the middle with a guitar and a singing monk on the right holding sheet music sitting at a table on a dark brown stage. Two of the musicians are wearing costumes of the popular Italian theater Commedia dell'arte. These paintings each colorfully represent three musicians wearing masks. Whereas they had previously focused on the conceptual realist side of Cubism, they now became more interested in materiality and the ability of collage to suggest multiple layers of meaning. They were both completed in 1921 in Fontainebleau near Paris, France, and exemplify the Synthetic Cubist style the flat planes of color and "intricate puzzle-like composition" giving the appearance of cutout paper with which the style originated. Cubist Collage Goes Abstract These new techniques had a profound and immediate effect on the work of Picasso and Braque. The Surrealists were enchanted with text. For the Surrealist artists, collage no longer had to do exclusively with paper and glue. The Dadaists and their techniques of relief assemblage, overpainting and photo-collage influenced Surrealism. Three Musicians is the title of two similar oil paintings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. For the Cubist artists, papier coll had opened onto construction and design. Prior to its use by Braque and Picasso, collage was primarily a craft technique used by women and hobbyists in the 19th century to make scrapbooks. were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art. Pablo Picasso, 1921, Nous autres musiciens (Three Musicians), oil on canvas, 204.5 × 188.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art Cubism is an early 20th-century art movement which took a revolutionary new.
