Violin and Palette
Georges Braque French
Not on view
Braque’s Violin and Palette contains the Cubists’ first explicit allusions to the trompe l’oeil tradition: the artist’s palette and the green curtain, pulled back at upper right. Like Gijsbrechts in the painting on the adjacent wall, Braque daubed the palette faithfully with the same colors used on the rest of his canvas. Instead of painting a picture-within-a-picture, however, he took a picture apart. By refusing to employ modeling and perspective consistently, he exposed, through inversion, these two fundamental tricks of the painter’s trade. Most tangibly real is the nail that casts a shadow (at the apex of the composition), an emblem of pictorial artifice since the seventeenth century.
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