Georges Braque’s Violin and Pitcher shows a combining of ideas and the beginning of analytical cubism. This work is perhaps Braque’s first break away from faceting purely to display subject matter and towards a style where facets flow of a logic of their own.
The work of Paul Cezanne led the way for paintings like Violin and Pitcher. Cezanne was interested in the way light reacted to form rather than what it was lighting: the form itself. Cezanne also began to explore the object that the viewer knows to exist in the painting; not just the view of the object gained by looking at it from one angle. Cezanne’s work was largely known as impressionism. His impressionist paintings such as Basket with Apples, Bottle, Biscuits and Fruit were the beginning of what would become Violin and Pitcher. The unnatural tilting of the plate’s surface made way for the multiple viewpoints in the violin and the lack of form or outline in the fruit the eventual faceting.
The subject matter of Violin and Pitcher can’t be read immediately due to the rather heavy fragmentation. An obvious clue is the painting’s title and upon inspection the viewer can soon find the violin in the foreground and the pitcher somewhere in the midground. Beyond the violin
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Another notable difference is that Seated Nude is not fragmented anywhere near as much as Violin and Pitcher, with the facets layered on the surface of the body making subject matter far more obvious. A relevant comparison to the treatment of light and colour in Violin and Pitcher is Picasso’s Seated Nude, also painted in 1910. However a very small amount of a warm reddish-brown is used in Seated Nude on the figure’s face bringing it forward against the cool blue of the rest of the painting. Secondly, the lack of contrasting colours creates a flattening of space and makes the viewer aware of the picture plane. This treatment of one area of detail from which everything else flows eventually led to synthetic cubism, where no detail short of that of the object itself would do. In turn, the analytical period of cubist work that Violin and Pitcher began would lay the building blocks for synthetic cubism. The work Braque painted before Violin and Pitcher such as his Harbour in Normandy of the same year help illustrate the transition between early and analytical cubism. The colour is extremely mono-chromatic and the contrast is achieved almost purely through the light and shadow. Fragmented architecture draws the strong vertical lines of intersecting walls as they disappear into a sea of facets.
Early cubism, with its impressionist influences, laid the building blocks for the breakthrough that Violin and Pitcher would start. The violin shows parts in views from front-on, three-quarter and either side. Similar work echoing Violin and Pitcher soon began to arise, such as Braque’s Woman with Mandolin (1910) and Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard. Violin and Pitcher displayed a new level of abstraction which, with that of many other works, would become analytical cubism.
An interesting aspect of Violin and Pitcher is Braque’s treatment of colour.
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