Georges Braque

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paris (sold: 4e vente Kahnweiler, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 7-8,1923, lot 4)
Rose Fried Gallery, New York
Mrs. Charles H. Russell, Jr., New York (acquired circa 1930)
John S. H. Russell, Washington, D.C.
E.V. Thaw & Co., Inc., New York
Acquired from the above in 1982

New York, Saidenberg Gallery, Georges Braque, An American Tribute, 1964, no. 29
Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Braque: The Papier Collés, 1982-83, no. 22

Braque completed this still-life in 1911, at the beginning of what is commonly known as his Synthetic Cubist period.  In contrast to his Analytic Cubist compositions of the two preceding years, these works were composed with a greater attention to the individuality of each compositional element and their surrounding space.  In these pictures, objects are flattened, shallow space projects forward rather than recedes, and colors are usually neutral tones of grays, tans and black.  One of the most successful means of achieving this effect was by the use of collage, a process that emphasized the variety of components within a given composition. 

For this collage, Braque creates the still-life of a glass and bottle by using a variety of media, including colored paper and 'imitation wood' paper.  He positions these objects on an oval-shaped board that alludes to the surface of a table-top.  Braque began using oval formats in 1910 and increasingly employed them in his Synthetic Cubist compositions.  The artist was fascinated with the compact pictorial surface and the greater concentration of subject matter that was allowed by the elision of corners.  "With oval formats," he famously commented, "I regained the sense of the horizontal and the vertical."  Karen Wilkin has written the following about these compositions: "Fragments of trompe-l'oeil modeling, a relic both of Braque's past and of the papiers collés, form a stablizing vertical and horizontal axis, cardinal points against which everything fans out in a casual scattering of luminous planes.  Braque turns the commonplace, by now predictable iconography of the Cubist studio into some of the most elegant, intelligent painting of the twentieth century" (Karen Wilkin, Braque, New York, 1991, pp. 36-37).