Georges Braque — La Musicienne
How often do you look at an object while staying stock still? Not often, if ever. Even if you stay in one place, your eyes do not: you tilt and crane your head; you explore the different surfaces, facets, the nooks and surprises that make something a sight worthy of intense looking. If what you are looking at is moving too — a machine, an animal, a musician, say — the process becomes a kind of dance. You try, if you can, to see them from every angle. You work to overcome the limitations of having just two eyes.
This, in essence, is what cubism is: the dance of looking at something properly, expressed all at once in two dimensions. It is an old movement now, 111 years old, but against five centuries of art that pretended — and so convincingly too — that we see things in single-point perspective, it still seems strange. The name itself was derisive: ‘it hates forms,’ wrote the critic Louis Vauxcelles back in 1908, it ‘reduces everything […] to geometric schemas and to cubes.’
Perhaps. But in its way cubism is more true to life than those paintings where we see just one side of things and people, against an orderly world where things recede always in orderly fashion to a single vanishing point. It’s a kind of hyperrealism. Not reduction, but addition.
There are not many cubes in cubism, as it goes, nor geometric figures, properly speaking. There are different approaches, because the list of cubists is as long as your arm, and because they all evolved over time. Braque — who started it all, with Picasso — was fond of letters, patterns, and pasting paper into his work. Picasso liked African tribal art, paint textures, and angles; Fernand Leger, cylinders, arcs, and unmixed colours; Juan Gris, severity, clarity, and crayons. Every one of them experimented, changed and grew.
By the time Braque painted La Musicienne in 1917 he and cubism had been through the First World War. While others, like Picasso and Gris, had gone on painting in Paris, he was called up, and, in May 1915, suffered a head wound so severe that he went temporarily blind. He had to be trepanned before his sight returned. He would not start painting again until halfway through 1917. He started La Musicienne perhaps a couple of months later.
It is life-size, bigger even, at just over two metres tall, busily sombre with its greys and browns against dark red and blue, set off by panels of painted wood-grain, dots, diamonds. It is not clear what instrument the musician is playing but her hands and the eyes are picked out carefully, and she looks straight out — to let you know there is a human inside those planes and lines. It is often described as a severe painting, which it is, but there is also pleasure being had. Braque once said that to work from nature was to improvise, and you can tell he is doing that here. He enjoyed all doing those diamond dabs and swirls of grain.
Cubism — modern art in general — is often presented as a violent break with what came before. You cannot say that of La Musicienne. For Braque it must have felt like a return to what came before: music, women, painting. And, of course, sight. Perhaps it is a severe picture because — for all cubism’s playfulness — Braque knew, after his injury, how weighty a business seeing was. In his situation, you too would be want to look at something from every angle at once.
