Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Georges Braque
French; 20th-century
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art
94%
Man with a Guitar. 1911-12. Oil on canvas
On this viewing, the main thing that struck me about Braque's painting was that loop of squiggles dragged through paint in the lower righthand corner. It's salient for several reasons: it's not quite commensurate with either the hard-and-fast linework or the blotchy, daubed surface effects that make up the rest of the canvas; it blends and combines whereas the whole of the picture beyond it just fragments and rends apart; it is pure painting — purely "abstract" — in an uncomplicated way that makes everything else seem fettered with the difficulties of transmuting the world onto a flat plane. This fettering, of course, is the core of Cubism's aesthetic significance. So much has been said about these planes interlocking but failing to congeal, about how that rope at top left emerges into physical presence from a non-space, about the turning-into surface of every embodied thing here. But amidst all this agonizing, a moment of freedom — that's where the value (not just the importance) of Cubism resides. (TFS, 2025)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
73%
Pitcher and Three Bottles. 1908. Oil on canvas
This is the calm before cubism's storm, and it's a nice painting, if far from Braque's best. You can see him working through Cézanne's shards of figuration, working them up into so many discrete planes and beginning to recognize and deal with the untenability of this operation if plasticity is to be preserved. This is there most substantially in the way the shadowed space between the bases of the pitcher and the two bottles climbs up towards the back wall and dissipates there into patchy greens and grays, as well as in the top surface of that piece of fruit, the front face of the pitcher, and the tabletop's sudden break with perspective at left. The surface of the painting overall is hereby left pretty well pulled apart, which Braque has tried to remedy by floating his greens all throughout the scene. It's quaint compared with the full-on commitment to planarity that would come in the following years, but it works out in a small way. The grassy accent at the mouth of the pitcher, itself a response to the hue of the front bottle's right side, is the best single instance of this. (TFS, 2026)