Georges Braque

In this painting, Braque represents a tilted table top on which he has placed a plate of fruit, a textile fragment, and a folded newspaper. By superimposing their flat, geometric shapes on a diamond-shaped field pierced with shaded openings, he mimics the effect of collage, in which scraps of paper and fabric might be glued to a surface then painted or left untouched. He playfully extends the green textile’s decorative pattern of red dots onto the rim of the platter. Through subtle subversions of mass and spatial relationships, he transforms a traditional still-life motif into a two-dimensional abstraction.