Still Life: Playing Card, Bottle, Newspaper, and Tobacco Packet (Le Courrier)
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.Whereas Picasso liked to shape his cutouts into silhouetted objects and Gris inlaid his like marquetry, Braque preferred cut rectangles that insist on their identity as flat sheets of paper. His papers are cast about pell-mell across faintly outlined tabletops, even as they take on other meanings. The presence of the masthead from Le Courrier Colonial: Organe de Madagascar et des Colonies de l’Océan Indien brings the outside reality of French colonialism into the picture. The newspaper is a “courier” to the reader, a function akin to the informational relay typical of trompe l’oeil medleys. Braque’s altered masthead reads “ORGAN[E] DE MAD[AME],” a bawdy reference deepened by the hole of the adjacent cutout heart.
Artwork Details
- Title: Still Life: Playing Card, Bottle, Newspaper, and Tobacco Packet (Le Courrier)
- Artist: Georges Braque (French, Argenteuil 1882–1963 Paris)
- Date: 1914
- Geography: Country of Origin France
- Medium: Cut-and-pasted printed newspaper, printed wallpaper, printed packing, charcoal, graphite, black ink, and white opaque watercolor on laid paper
- Dimensions: 20 × 22 in. (50.8 × 55.9 cm)
- Classification: Collages
- Credit Line: Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1952
- Rights and Reproduction: Philadelphia Museum of Art, A E. Gallatin Collection, 1952
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art