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CUBISM · WORK

Violin and Jug

Georges Braque · 1910

Braque shattered a violin and a jug into a fog of brown facets — then, at the top, painted one perfectly real nail to hold it all up.

The canvas
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Georges Braque, Violin and Jug, 1910. Oil on canvas. 3 ft 10 in × 2 ft 5 in.
Kunstmuseum Basel. Gift of Raoul La Roche
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
  1. The painted nail
    Start at the very top. That is a nail — painted with old-fashioned, photographic realism, casting a neat little shadow, as if it were pinning the whole picture to the wall. It is the one perfectly solid, real-looking thing in the painting, and Braque put it there on purpose.
  2. The violin
    Below the nail the violin surfaces out of the rubble: the curled scroll near the center, the strings, and lower down the unmistakable curves of the body with its f-holes. Braque, who loved music, lets you half-find the instrument and then lose it again in the facets.
  3. The jug
    Above the violin, a pale faceted shape with a rounded lip is the jug. It is dissolving into the same brown-gray planes as everything around it — readable for a second, then gone: exactly the brink of legibility Analytic Cubism likes to walk.
The story · 5 chapters
~18 min total
1
Lay of the land
The other half of Cubism
Everyone remembers Picasso. But Cubism took two — and the quieter, more methodical half was a house-painter’s son from Normandy named Georges Braque.
2
The winter
Faceting a violin
Braque takes a violin and a jug and shatters them into a near-colourless shimmer of planes — the purest example of the style he and Picasso were building.
3
How to look
Find the nail, then the violin
Start at the top with the one solid thing — a painted nail — then hunt down the scroll, the strings and the body of the violin surfacing out of the rubble.
4
The point
Why paint a perfect nail
In the most radical painting in Europe, Braque planted one old-fashioned illusion — a joke, a foothold, and a quiet hint of the collage revolution two years off.
5
What happened next
How it got to Basel
A Swiss banker who bought Cubism when nobody else would gave his collection to his home city — which is why the textbook Analytic Cubist still life hangs in Basel.
1909–10
Painted
3′10″ × 2′5″
Dimensions
Basel
Now at
Provenance
Every hand it passed through
1909–10
Georges Braque (the artist)
Paris
Painted in Montmartre over the winter, at the height of the daily Picasso–Braque exchange.
from 1921
Raoul La Roche
Paris / Basel
The Basel-born banker and friend of Le Corbusier buys heavily at the 1921 Kahnweiler sequestration sale (Braque’s dealer stock, seized in the war), building one of the deepest private Cubist collections.
1952–63
Kunstmuseum BaselMuseum
Basel
La Roche gives his Cubist collection to his home city’s museum in stages, across three donations — making Basel a stronghold of the movement.