Still Life with Violin
Georges Braque French
Not on view
Braque produced the first-ever Cubist papiers collés in autumn 1912 when he pasted strips of imitation wood-grain wallpaper into his drawings. The resemblance to the flat wood boards beloved of trompe l’oeil painters is striking. Here, the faux pine stands for the wood of both the violin and the paneling on which it hangs, effectively fusing foreground and background. Braque’s charcoal drawing and shading unite and harmonize the commercial stock with the fine-art paper of the support. The pleated planes forming the violin’s body seem to push out and back, as if vibrating like sound, while the parallel lines of its strings double as the lines of music paper. Braque was a keen amateur musician: his theme here is music itself.
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