|
remarkable that the letters ‘D BAL’
are painted on the canvas with stencilled typeset. In this way Braque
introduced an element that elevates the inherent characteristic of flatness
of the applied letter, and he included thereby a new formalized link in the
complex and contrast-filled planar/spatial-duality of the Cubist painting.
It is not a reproduction of letters, rather it is letters of a material
character that are just as much a part of the outside reality as printed
letters are. This was a relationship that Braque was quite conscious about.
[...] Braque also incorporated a new element in the painting by using a
plane with veins like imitation wood. This is an element that based on its
explicit planar character harbors the same formal nature as the stencilled
letters, with the same symbolic character, and which due to its material
nature to some extent contains the same quality of outside reality. [...]
The collage became aesthetically enormously meaningful for art during the
entire 20th century. The curiosity and wish to ask questions and explore
these entirely new areas, to use those materials and those combinations
that at first glance must seem to be illogical in the context of an
artistic expression, was of manifest significance for the modern art movement
in the 20th century; from the ‘ready-mades’ of Dadaism [and] the ‘objects
trouves’ of Surrealism to the ‘Installation Art’ of the latest decades.
[...] It is an original and logical pictorial discovery. In Braque’s first
paper collages the paper pieces are incorporated as color planes that
support the composition and integrate with the drawn motif. The wall paper
has a general and distinct inherent planar character. The pieces of wall
paper have in addition a content related value as a symbol; they indicate
the table the still-life is placed upon. The wood imitation tells about the
character of the table’s material [of construction] as a ‘trompe-l’oeil’.
Finally the pieces of paper have an important aesthetic meaning: they exist
in their own concrete character as material, and they represent an exterior
reality in the painting and thereby provide a new dimension to the Cubist
vision” [Villads Villadsen, “Picasso & Braque”, Exhibition Catalogue,
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 1993].
Even if the
Cubists’ use of stencilled letters, textured or printed pieces of paper and
cloth, or of entire compositions created primarily from separate pieces of
paper may in one sense constitute different aesthetic approaches, as
particularly William Rubin has emphasized, the aesthetic commonality
between them seems for most purposes to be more important: “For Picasso, collage, construction, and
papier colle’ were no more or less
about reality than his work of the previous year. They were about alternate
ways of imaging reality” [William
Rubin, “Picasso and Braque, Pioneering Cubism”, MOMA, New
York 1989].
The consequences of
experimenting with paper collage, the stylistic outcome in terms of the
aesthetic results, were summarized by Douglas
Cooper this way: “Both Braque
and Picasso saw and came to relish too the
|