The banker who bought Cubism
Why does the textbook example of Analytic Cubism hang in Basel, a quiet Swiss city on the Rhine, rather than Paris or New York? Because of one man. Raoul La Roche was a Basel-born banker working in Paris and a friend of the architect Le Corbusier, and in the years after the First World War he did the unfashionable thing: he bought Cubism, in bulk, when most collectors still thought it was a joke or a fraud.
La Roche assembled one of the great early collections of Picasso and Braque, and then, in 1952, he gave the bulk of it to the public museum of his home city, the Kunstmuseum Basel. At a stroke a mid-sized Swiss museum became one of the world’s strongholds of Cubist painting, which is why a pilgrim wanting to see Violin and Jug in the flesh buys a ticket to Basel.
It is a fitting home for a quiet masterpiece by the quieter of the two founders. Picasso got the fame, the scandals and the headlines; Braque got the deep respect of fellow painters and a slower-burning fame of his own. And this canvas (drab, patient, fiendishly built, the violin half-dissolved in its gray planes beneath that one perfect nail) is the one that other painters point to when they want to show what Analytic Cubism, at its absolute best, could do.