The banker who bought Cubism
Why does the textbook example of Analytic Cubism hang in Basel, a quiet Swiss city on the Rhine, rather than Paris or New York? Because of one man. Raoul La Roche was a Basel-born banker working in Paris and a friend of the architect Le Corbusier, and in the years after the First World War he did the unfashionable thing: he bought Cubism, in bulk, when most collectors still thought it was a joke or a fraud.
La Roche assembled one of the great early collections of Picasso and Braque — and then, in 1952, he gave the bulk of it to the public museum of his home city, the Kunstmuseum Basel. At a stroke a mid-sized Swiss museum became one of the world’s strongholds of Cubist painting, which is why a pilgrim wanting to see Violin and Jug in the flesh buys a ticket to Basel.
It is a fitting home for a quiet masterpiece by the quieter of the two founders. Picasso got the fame, the scandals and the headlines; Braque got the deep respect of fellow painters and a slower-burning fame of his own. And this canvas — drab, patient, fiendishly built, the violin half-dissolved in its gray planes beneath that one perfect nail — is the one that other painters point to when they want to show what Analytic Cubism, at its absolute best, could do.