Faceting a violin

Over the winter of 1909 into 1910, in his Paris studio, Braque painted a violin and a jug. That is the whole subject, two ordinary things on a table. What he did to them is the point. He shattered each object into dozens of small flat facets, the little angled planes you see on a cut gem, and laid those planes out as if you were circling the table and seeing the violin from several sides at once. This is Analytic Cubism at full strength: the patient analysis of a thing into all its views, reassembled on a flat canvas.

He drained almost all the color out of it. The whole picture is a fog of browns, grays and soft ochres, deliberately drab, because color would only be a distraction. With nothing pretty to look at, your eye is forced onto the only thing left: the structure, the shimmer of planes sliding over and into one another. Braque even lets the facets bleed, an edge that should belong to the violin opens and leaks into the background, so object and air are built from the same broken light. (Painters have a name for this trick of letting one plane flow into the next: they call it passage.)

The choice of subject is not random. Musical instruments turn up again and again in Cubism, and for good reasons: a violin has strong, familiar curves you can still half-recognize even after it has been smashed into planes, which keeps the picture from tipping into pure abstraction. And Braque loved music, he played instruments in the studio. A violin let him work right at the edge of legibility: faceted almost past recognition, but never quite. Look long enough and the instrument keeps surfacing and dissolving (the curled scroll, then an f-hole, then nothing) like a word on the tip of your tongue.