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Georges Braque's Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table
At The Metropolitan Museum of Art
by Suzanne Wulach
First let me say this: I have good news and bad news.
Analytic Cubism is aptly named: no other style has been so coldly intellectual, so devoid of human emotion. This movement, created largely by the joint efforts of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, attempted to eschew how the eye perceives the world (as planes and shapes and tones) for the way the mind understands it (as one object). Braque's Candlestick and Playing Cards on a Table is a prime example of this. Historically, it is a milestone; Braque bravely shuns the idea of pictorial realism, instead cutting up his still life into a bundle of sharp pieces. The first recognizable elements of the painting are the monochromatic squares that are modeled in order to intentionally counteract the flatness of the painting and that blend together to create a thickly fragmented space. From the geometric litter of their angles emerges the edge of a table, the only completely realistic element of the piece. Braque has mastered analytical cubism, and because his painting so resembles a smashed mirror, he even manages to suggest that cerebral breakdown of space is a physical process.
The painting, however, leaves viewers blank. They admire the mastery with which each brushstroke was applied, they begin to ponder the questions of dimensions and space, and they feel nothing. The low mechanical whirring that the piece seems to emit is devoid even of the excitement of what Braque has achieved. He praised the mind absolutely, and though this allowed him to prove that a picture has only two dimensions, it also robbed the painting of an essential component even the most elementary artists can accomplish: emotion. Braque's decision to spurn the emotional capabilities of visual communication in lieu of its capability to communicate ideas has resulted in a painting that was as unbalanced in concept as it is lifeless in realization.
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