Fruit Dish and Glass

Fruit Dish and Glass
Artist	Georges Braque
Year	1912
Medium	charcoal, wallpaper, gouache paint, paper, paperboard
Movement	Cubism
Location	Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, US
Identifiers	The Met object ID: 490612
[]

Fruit Dish and Glass (1912) is the first papier collé, by Georges Braque, a technique which Braque invented.

Braque was inspired to create this piece after visiting an Avignon shop where he purchased a roll of faux bois paper, simulating oak paneling and consisting of two kinds of printed motifs on a dark beige background. Braque may have been drawn to this paper because he was trained in a technique called trompe-l'oeil; which allowed him to create pictorial effects that resemble woodgrain and marble finishes, but are made with paint and a special wide comb. Braque then may have found it amusing to incorporate the woodgrain paper in his piece. He may also have wished to use the paper to create a visual pun about the nature of representation. He noticed that because the paper looks realistic and yet it is flat, and pasted on, it undermines spatial relationships. It can act as the foreground, the background, or both. When first observing Fruit Dish and Glass, one might recognize a glass filled with grapes and pears, but these elements are flattened and distorted versions of actual objects. Rather than trying to accurately represent reality, Braque is playing with textures, shapes, and composition to construct a painting that is half recognizable and half symbolic. Indeed, reality is invoked in phrase-like fragments, like a sentence, which combine to create a rich constellation of meanings.

The piece is based on the interaction of wallpaper glued to the support and charcoal lines, which evoke both objects and words. The subject matter is a glass bowl, pears, and grapes, between what looks like a dish and a wine glass, or perhaps a candlestick. Braque probably began the work by cutting out pieces of wallpaper and moving them around a flat surface to imagine his composition. He then might have positioned two strips of the wood grain wallpaper vertically on a large sheet of white paper to signify the walls of a café. He also put a small horizontal piece of wallpaper at the bottom of the paper to represent a table top. Then, he drew the glass, pears, grapes and the words ‘ALE’ and ‘BAR’ in charcoal and added black lines in ink to the wallpaper, and a circular knob to the horizon piece of wallpaper at the bottom to make it look like the drawer of a table. The work has a variety of textures that add confusion to spatial relations of the objects in the composition. For example, in addition to the oak wallpaper, Braque used a comb to add an additional element of trompe-l'oeil to give the piece even more perceptual distortion. Braque also adds texture, applying a mix of sand and gessoto the background. This texture brings the background forward, making it more difficult to interpret the perspective. Braque’s process was deliberately mystifying. His technique is full of subtleties that one doesn't notice at first. Both the physical and logical relationships of the objects are often difficult to construct. The painting is a visual puzzle which challenges the viewer to understand what is shown from clues and fragments.

...
Wikipedia