Description
Among Georges Braque’s largest and most ambitious still lifes of the 1930s, Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument features complex ornamentation and over-lapping, visually playful patterns that create rhythmic movement. An example of what Braque called “rhyming shapes” and “metamorphic confusion,” the round fruits on the table mimic the holes of stringed instruments, and the curving lines of the mandolin evoke a fruit bowl. “Echo answers to echo,” Braque once said, “everything reverberates”—even the work’s surface, which he enlivened with coarse sand.
Provenance
The artist; Paul Rosenberg and Company, New York [London 1938]; sold to Mr. and Mrs. Leigh Block, Chicago, Feb. 27, 1947 [Block stock card]; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1988.
Accession Number
110966
Medium
Oil and sand on canvas
Dimensions
114.3 × 145.5 cm (45 × 58 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Gift of Mary and Leigh Block
Background & Context
Background Story
Georges Braque's "Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument" (1938) is an oil and sand on canvas that combines Braque's Cubist heritage with a new interest in texture and material. The addition of sand to the oil paint creates a rough, granular surface that adds a tactile dimension to the visual experience. The composition shows a tabletop arrangement of fruits and a stringed instrument—perhaps a guitar or mandolin—which were classic subjects in Cubist still life. Braque's treatment is more relaxed and decorative than the rigorous structures of Analytical Cubism. The forms are simplified and slightly flattened, the colors are rich and varied, the composition is balanced and harmonious. The sand technique, which Braque had first used in the 1910s and returned to in later decades, adds a material richness that distinguishes these works from the purely visual art of conventional painting. By 1938, Braque was internationally recognized as one of the greatest living artists, and his works from this period combine the lessons of a lifetime of innovation with a new freedom and confidence.
Cultural Impact
Braque's use of sand mixed with oil paint was a pioneering technique that added a new dimension of texture and materiality to modern painting, influencing the development of mixed-media art.
Why It Matters
This still life with fruits and a stringed instrument demonstrates Braque's late mastery, the sand-enhanced paint creating a rich surface that invites both the eye and the touch.
