Violin and Palette

1909

Not on view

Returned to lender

This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.

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.

Artwork Details

Overview

Exhibition History

Title: Violin and Palette
Artist: Georges Braque (French, Argenteuil 1882–1963 Paris)
Date: 1909
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 36 1/8 × 16 7/8 in. (91.8 × 42.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (54.1412)
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art