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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)