Faceting a violin

Over the winter of 1909 into 1910, in his Paris studio, Braque painted a violin and a jug. That is the whole subject — two ordinary things on a table. What he did to them is the point. He shattered each object into dozens of small flat facets, the little angled planes you see on a cut gem, and laid those planes out as if you were circling the table and seeing the violin from several sides at once. This is Analytic Cubism at full strength: the patient analysis of a thing into all its views, reassembled on a flat canvas.

He drained almost all the color out of it. The whole picture is a fog of browns, grays and soft ochres — deliberately drab, because color would only be a distraction. With nothing pretty to look at, your eye is forced onto the only thing left: the structure, the shimmer of planes sliding over and into one another. Braque even lets the facets bleed — an edge that should belong to the violin opens and leaks into the background, so object and air are built from the same broken light. (Painters have a name for this trick of letting one plane flow into the next: they call it passage.)

The choice of subject is not random. Musical instruments turn up again and again in Cubism, and for good reasons: a violin has strong, familiar curves you can still half-recognize even after it has been smashed into planes, which keeps the picture from tipping into pure abstraction. And Braque loved music — he played instruments in the studio. A violin let him work right at the edge of legibility: faceted almost past recognition, but never quite. Look long enough and the instrument keeps surfacing and dissolving — the curled scroll, then an f-hole, then nothing — like a word on the tip of your tongue.