Basel, again

Like its near-twin Violin and Jug, The Portuguese hangs today in Basel, and for the same reason: the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, who bought Cubism in bulk in the years after the First World War, when the market for it had collapsed and few others would touch it. He gave his great collection, in stages, to the public museum of his home city — which is how a small Swiss town on the Rhine became one of the world’s capitals of Cubist painting.

Stand in front of it in Basel and the picture still barely gives up its guitarist — a brown storm of facets with four sharp letters riding on top, as legible now as the day they were stencilled. That is the real legacy: once type could live on a canvas as pure form, it never left. Within a year it became collage; within a decade the Russian Constructivists (designers who turned hard geometry into revolutionary posters) and the German Bauhaus (the school that made clean, modern design a creed) were building whole pictures and posters out of bold printed type. Half of twentieth-century graphic design traces back, in part, to a brown haze of a guitar player with the words D BAL floating at the top.