Start at the letters
The way into this brown fog is the one thing in it that is perfectly sharp. Look to the upper right: the stencilled capitals D BAL — the tail end of GRAND BAL, the wording of a dance-hall poster — and beside them a scatter of stencilled numbers. They are crisp, flat and mechanical, and they sit on top of the picture rather than inside its haze, like a label stuck to a misted window.
Now drop your eye and let the rest assemble. Below the letters, a paler rounded mass is the musician’s head and shoulders, tipped a little, nearly lost. Lower still, on the diagonal, you can find the taut strings and the soft curve of a sound-hole — the guitar across his lap, the firmest object in the whole picture. Everything else opens and leaks, plane into plane, so the man and the air he sits in are woven from the same broken light. The letters are the nail you hang the rest on.