NARRATOR:
Georges Braque’s Still Life with Musical Instruments was painted shortly after his discharge from the French army during World War I. The treatment of objects as fragmented, interlocking forms identifies the painting as a late example of Cubism, a style Braque had pioneered with Pablo Picasso.
It is hard to distinguish the individual objects depicted here: a guitar, sheet music, near the top, a plate with grapes, and a variety of patterned materials—all laid out on an octagonal table top. The flat, overlapping shapes are rendered in the muted colors typical of Cubism, decorated with dots or scratched with linear patterns to suggest wood graining. Their near-abstract arrangement recalls Braque’s technique of pasting paper or other materials onto the canvas, reminding us of the essential artifice of using a flat surface to depict three-dimensional objects. Brilliant and meticulous, Braque typically worked on several paintings at the same time. He sometimes took years to complete a single canvas.
Braque’s association with Picasso began around 1907, when both were experimenting with the visual properties of form and space, and it lasted until Braque’s enlisted in 1914. During the war, Braque was seriously injured by an exploding shell, and left temporarily blind. After he recovered, he gained critical praise for paintings such as this, confirming his status as a leading painter in post-war France.
Still Life with Musical Instruments
1918
Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963)
On View
Into a carefully delineated octagon, Braque’s composition crowds a sheet of music, a wind instrument, a glass, a cluster of grapes, and other less immediately recognizable objects. Varied textures—visible brushstrokes, brisk polka dots, a wave pattern scraped through the wet paint with a comb—call attention to the picture’s surface and create an effect reminiscent of collage. Having suspended his painting practice to serve in the French military from 1914 to 1917, Braque returned to Cubism with a new tactile vigor after the First World War. Musical instruments played a key role in his interwar pictures, for, as he would point out, “as an object, the musical instrument had the particular attraction of being animated by touch.” This painting’s first owner was a key member of the Parisian musical and theatrical scene: Léonide Massine, a dancer and choreographer for the Ballets Russes.
Details
- Artist Name: Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963)
- Title: Still Life with Musical Instruments
- Date: 1918
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 25-1/2 x 36-1/4 in. (64.8 x 92.1 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1986.2.P
- Copyright: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Reproduction, including downloading of ARS works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object Information
[Léonce Rosenberg, Paris].
[Howard Putzel (d. 1945), Hollywood (1935-1938), Paris (before August 1938-summer 1940), and New York (1940-1945)] .
Léonide Massine (1896-1979), Paris (with tours of U.S. West Coast,1935-1938), New York (1939-1946) and London, by at least October 1935; sold 1964 to;
[E.V. Thaw & Co., New York, sold 1964, as La Musique, to];
The Norton Simon Foundation, sold 1986 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
[Howard Putzel (d. 1945), Hollywood (1935-1938), Paris (before August 1938-summer 1940), and New York (1940-1945)] .
Léonide Massine (1896-1979), Paris (with tours of U.S. West Coast,1935-1938), New York (1939-1946) and London, by at least October 1935; sold 1964 to;
[E.V. Thaw & Co., New York, sold 1964, as La Musique, to];
The Norton Simon Foundation, sold 1986 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
"L' Effort Moderne," Braque
- Galerie Leonce Rosenberg, 1918-03-05 to 1918-03-31
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964-08-04 to 1970-12-14
The Cubist Epoch
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970-12-15 to 1971-02-21
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971-04-07 to 1971-06-07
[on loan]
- Princeton University Art Museum, 1971-06 to 1972-08
Forty-eight Paintings and Sculptures from the Norton Simon Foundation and the Norton Simon Inc. Museum
- Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1972-10 to 1974-10-08
[on loan]
- High Museum of Art, 1980-11-20 to 1981-08-05
French Paintings: Collection of Leonide Massine
- New York, Marie Harriman Gallery, 1935-02-18 to 1935-03-09
The Collection of Leonide Massine
- New York, Saidenberg Gallery, 1959-04-14 to 1959-05-16
Masterpieces of Five Centuries, Forty-Eight Paintings and Sculptures from the Norton Simon Foundation and the Norton Simon, Inc. Museum
- Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1972-10-04 to 1973-11-04
Reinstallation of South Wing
- Norton Simon Museum, 1993-10-07 to 1995-08-13
- Isarlov, George, Georges Braque, no. 233
- Georges Braque, p. 37
- Cooper, Douglas, The Cubist Epoch, no. 35, pl. 263, as Still Life with Musical Instruments pp. 219, 278
- Raynal, Maurice, George Braque, 1921, coll.: Léonce Rosenberg
- Bulletin de "L'effort Moderne", 1926, as Nature-Morte
- Saidenberg Gallery, French Paintings: Collection of Leonide Massine, 1959, no. 3, as Music
- Bissière, R., Georges Braque, 1963, pl. 11, as Nature morte
- Valsecchi, M; and M. Carra, L'Opera completa di Braque dalla compisizione cubista al recupero dell'oggetto 1908-1929, 1971, no. 159 pp. 93-94
- Mangin, Nicole S., Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Georges Braque: Peintures 1916-1923, 1973, as Nature morte a la partition pp. 23-24
- Yaegashi, Cubism, 1979,
- Norton Simon Museum, Selected Paintings at the Norton Simon Museum, 1980, p. 132
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 187
- European Painting and Sculpture, ca. 1770-1937, 1991, fig. 1 pp. 203-206
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 232 p. 273
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