A musician, dissolved

The subject is a man with a guitar — a Portuguese musician Braque said he remembered from a bar years before, which is why the picture is also called The Emigrant. Braque painted much of it that summer in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees where he and Picasso spent the season working side by side. He took the seated player and broke him into a fine brown mesh of facets — so fine, so evenly spread across the canvas, that the figure nearly disappears into his own background.

The palette is almost gone: ochres, tobacco browns, soft grays, drained on purpose so nothing distracts from the structure. Edges open and bleed from object into air — the Analytic trick called passage, one plane melting into the next — until you can no longer say where the man stops and the room begins. Only the guitar across his lap, a few taut strings on the diagonal, quite refuses to dissolve.

This is Analytic Cubism at the edge of the cliff. The picture is so close to pure abstraction that, without help, a viewer could stare for a long time and find no man at all. Braque knew it. And his solution — the thing that makes this canvas a turning point rather than just a very good shimmer of brown — was to hammer a few hard, flat, unmistakable letters across the top, where the haze could not swallow them.