Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument

Among Georges Braque’s largest and most ambitious still lifes of the 1930s, Still Life with Fruits and Stringed Instrument features complex ornamentation and over-lapping, visually playful patterns that create rhythmic movement. An example of what Braque called “rhyming shapes” and “metamorphic confusion,” the round fruits on the table mimic the holes of stringed instruments, and the curving lines of the mandolin evoke a fruit bowl. “Echo answers to echo,” Braque once said, “everything reverberates”—even the work’s surface, which he enlivened with coarse sand.