Artwork Information

'Le guéridon (Vase gris et palette) [Pedestal Table (Grey Vase and Palette)]', 1938 is one of 15 still-life scenes including small table or gueridon that Braque painted between 1911 and 1952. In this large and late example, overlapping studio objects such as a vase, palette, painting and easel are juxtaposed with an uptilted tabletop that has been flattened and fused together with a vase and a tablecloth.

Braque maintained that the space between the objects in his paintings had a kind of solidity, describing it as ‘tactile, even manual’. Here, the artist draws attention to the artwork’s materiality by mixing sand into the paint and painting highly illusionistic trompe-l’oeil (trick of the eye) marble and woodgrain surfaces, a skill he learnt during his initial training as a housepainter. Believing that it ‘is not enough to make people see the object you paint. You must also make them touch it’, Braque, in the years following World War I, started to incorporate more decorative surfaces into his works, interweaving textural and chromatic flourishes within his Cubist compositions.

− 2024