Still Life with Violin

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Still Life with Violin

France, 1913
Paintings
Oil on canvas
36 1/2 x 26 in. (92.71 x 66 cm)
Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. George Gard de Sylva Collection and the Copley Foundation (M.86.128)
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Since gallery displays may change often, please contact us before you visit to make certain this item is on view.

Curator Notes

Together with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque invented Cubism. Their paintings from the years 1909 to 1914 seemed to grow one from the other, indicating the close relationship between the artists....
Together with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque invented Cubism. Their paintings from the years 1909 to 1914 seemed to grow one from the other, indicating the close relationship between the artists. Cubism was an art of everyday life tied particularly to the cafes of Paris; the works include vestiges of real-life referents (wood-grain paper, newspapers, packages of tobacco, and so forth). Still Life with Violin is a transitional work between the two phases of Cubism, the Analytic and the Synthetic. (The terms were coined by the artists' zealous Parisian dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.) Braque incorporated the hallmarks of Analytic Cubism in his fragmentation of form into multiple shifting planes and in his use of a restrained palette of browns and grays. His depiction of wood grain signals the rise of Synthetic Cubism, in which the fragmented planes are simplified, flattened out through a lack of shading, and combined into often patterned forms that give the illusion of recognizable objects. The wood-grained rectangle in Still Life with Violin conjures up an image of a violin's gleaming wood surface; the S-scrolls suggest sound holes; and the horizontal bars suggest a sheet of music. Braque's use of the oval format, which he devised in 1909, is characteristic of his Cubist works, as is his inclusion of snippets of floating typography such as the one here reading "Duo pour" (duet for). For the Cubists, form took primacy over subject matter.
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Bibliography

  • Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  • Price, Lorna.  Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988.
  • Powell III, Earl A., Robert Winter, and Stephanie Barron. The Robert O. Anderson Building. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986.
  • Price, Lorna.  Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988.
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members' Calendar 1988,  vol. 25-26, no. 12-1 (December, 1987-January, 1989).
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members' Calendar 1990.  vol. 27-28, no. 12-1 (December, 1989-January, 1991).
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
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