Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs
Georges Braque French
Not on view
This painting riffs on the novel process of Cubist collage while exploiting traditional artisanal methods. Rather than imitate wood-grain directly, Braque used a decorator’s comb to imitate the faux bois wallpaper he had pasted into his first papiers collés, here pretending to patch scraps of it together. The simulated strips of gray wallpaper with an incised trellis pattern recall the rose-and-trellis wallpaper Picasso employed in his first papiers collés. The black faux cutouts forming the pitched-up tabletop mimic a commercial paper used in other collages. Further allusions to artisanal practice include evidence of the use of a ruler and compass to draft the composition, and the bunch of grapes rendered in the stereotyped manner of a motif on a decorative frieze.
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