Audio Stop 4

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A wood table is piled with stylized and abstracted objects, including a jug, lemons, a knife, guitar, newspaper, and a smoking pipe in this horizontal still life painting. The objects are made up of areas of mostly flat color and many are outlined in black, creating the impression that some shapes are two-dimensional and assembled almost like a collage. We look down onto the top of the table and at the front, where the grain of the wood is painted in tan against a lighter background. Concentric black and white circles make up the knob on the face of the table’s single drawer. There are two rows of objects on the table. Along the front, near the left corner of the table, the knife hangs with its blade slightly over the open drawer. A newspaper with the title “LE JOUR” rests next to the knife. Next to the newspaper are two yellow pieces of fruit, near the front right corner of the table. Behind the fruit, the right third of the pitcher is marine blue and the left two thirds is mostly straw yellow, with one round olive-green area near the handle. Next to the pitcher is a tobacco pipe, and, at the back left edge of the table, the guitar. The instrument rests on its side so the front of the soundboard faces the viewer, and the neck extends to our left. The instrument is bisected lengthwise into two halves that appear to be spliced together, and the edges and features of the halves are not symmetrical or aligned with each other. The bottom half of the guitar is painted a beige color, and is curved like a typical guitar body. The top half is painted black, and the contour of the instrument’s body rises into two pointed peaks instead of mirroring the rounded forms below. The sound hole is markedly smaller on the bottom half, and the two halves of the hole do not exactly line up. A rectangular form behind the table could be a screen. The left side is fern green, the right side black. Behind the screen is a wallpapered wall above wood paneling. The wallpaper is patterned with teardrop shapes, dots, and zigzagging lines in fawn brown against parchment white. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “G Braque 29.”

Georges Braque

Still Life: Le Jour, 1929

East Building, Ground Level — Gallery 103-B

Georges Braque famously worked alongside Pablo Picasso as the two artists developed the new style of cubism around 1910. This painting is typical of a later phase in Braque’s career, when he incorporated elements of cubism into still lifes and other subjects. In this work, the wood grain on the table, the design of the wallpaper in the background, and the text on the newspaper emphasize the interplay of pattern and texture.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:

How does the human eye perceive the world around us? That’s one of the questions Georges Braque (and Pablo Picasso) explored in cubism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gone was any attempt to depict the illusion of three-dimensional space. Instead, the cubists typically flattened and abstracted objects and showed them from multiple vantage points.

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art.

HARRY COOPER:

That’s certainly true of the table, where in the bottom part of the table, we seem to be looking straight on, barely above the drawer; we can’t quite peek in. And yet we also seem to be seeing the tabletop almost from above.

What really pops out every time I look at this painting is the knife. That seems to be floating in space, sort of poised on the edge of the table. It seems to have done some work [laughs] on the rest of the image. A lot of the things in the image are quite sliced up. There’s some playful self-reference here to his procedure, which is to take reality—as cubism did—and slice it up, turn it around, put it back together in a way that we had never seen before.

NARRATOR:

And if the work looks like a collage to you, that’s no accident. Braque and Picasso had experimented with pasting paper onto canvas to make what are called papiers collés.

HARRY COOPER:

But they soon moved past papiers collés into paintings that looked like collages. Some of it is carefully painted to fool us into thinking that we’re looking at actual wood-graining, or cutout depictions of fruit. So there’s a play there, and I think this is another important thing about cubism, this play of levels of reality, levels of representation.

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