1936

Still Life with a Fruit Dish

French, 1882 - 1963

This composition compiles many perennial motifs of Georges Braque’s still-life paintings: a fruit dish, a wineglass with faceted stem, a newspaper masthead with a fragment of the publication’s title, a pipe, and fruit on a table. Still Life with a Fruit Dish also exemplifies Braque’s distinctive ornamental and colorful style of the mid-1930s. Consider, for example, the way the toothed leaf in the still life rhymes with similar forms both in the wallpaper-like shards above the table and in the downward-spilling patterned cloth. Following the artist’s longstanding practice, the wood tabletop aligns with the vertical picture surface so that rather than receding behind the picture plane as in an illusionistic work using conventional perspective, the still life seems to hover in a threshold space between two and three dimensions. Braque built the image from the background forward to emphasize its material, tactile, sensual aspects.