The day type walked in
Stencilled letters in a painting sound like nothing. They were a revolution, for a stack of reasons at once. Braque had let letters in before, in 1910, but as things glimpsed in a scene, words on a real sign. Here they are different: purely flat, purely formal, belonging not to the imagined room but to the surface of the canvas itself. They announce, bluntly, that this is a painted board, not a window you look through. Braque himself explained the logic simply: letters are forms that cannot be distorted (they are flat, with no depth of their own) so their plain presence makes clear the rest of the picture is not pretending to have depth either.
And they are mechanical. A stencil is a sign-painter’s and decorator’s tool, and Braque, remember, was a decorator’s son, trained in exactly these tradesman’s tricks. So the letters drag the cheap, mass-produced world of posters and price tags straight into the most rarefied painting in Europe. In a picture nearly too abstract to read, they are the one thing anyone can read instantly, a fixed, public, printed fact pinned to a private blur.
One year from real paper
Most of all, the letters point straight ahead, to the biggest break in modern art. If a flat, mass-produced printed mark can live in a painting, why paint it at all, why not glue the real thing down? That is exactly the step Picasso took the very next year, pasting a scrap of printed oilcloth onto a canvas and inventing collage, and Braque, that same autumn, ran his own parallel track to it, gluing strips of printed paper into his drawings to make the first papiers collés. Braque’s stencilled D BAL is the hinge: the last move either man made with a brush before they both reached for the glue.
