Roped to Picasso, still
Ayear after Violin and Jug, Georges Braque and Picasso were still “roped together on a mountain,” visiting each other’s studios daily and pushing the same experiment one notch further each time. By 1911 that experiment (Analytic Cubism, the breaking of objects into small faceted planes seen from several sides at once) had reached its most extreme, sealed-off point, so abstract it was nearly a private code. The pictures were faceted so far that the subject all but evaporated into a shimmer of brown and gray.
It was a thrilling place to be and a dangerous one. A few more facets and the picture would dissolve into pure abstract pattern, which neither painter wanted. They had been smuggling small clues back in (a curl, a string, a painted nail) to keep the work tethered to the real world. In The Portuguese, Braque smuggled in the most radical clue of all, and it changed what a painting could contain.