Violin and Grapes
Pablo Picasso Spanish
Not on view
The fluctuating planes in a shallow space are characteristic of Analytic Cubism and the modernist emphasis on the picture surface. Nevertheless, Picasso’s violin on a wall also harkens back to trompe l’oeil board paintings, which reversed the conventions of Renaissance perspective and refused to lead the eye into a fictive middle ground or distance. The artist mixed ham-handed and virtuosic renditions of the violin, having learned from Braque artisanal techniques for faking wood with a brush and a decorator’s comb. Not by chance, Picasso included a bunch of grapes (they spill out of a wicker basket)—the symbol of deceptive illusionism since antiquity and the fruit that the Cubists drew and painted more often than any other from 1912 onward.
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