Cards and Dice

Here you can see a work that has ¿only? recently been acquired by the museum: “Cards and Dice”, painted by Georges Braque in 1917.

In it, the surface of a table is seen in vertical perspective, which has been subjected to the Cubist order. The outline of some dice can be seen, along with the barely visible silhouette of an ace of spades, and the thumb of a hand holding some unknown cards.

In this early period of Cubism, you will notice that there was a preference for easily identifiable items, which have been reduced to geometric shapes. Fans, dice, violins, guitars, Harlequins, and so on. The full meaning of an object is conveyed by merely suggesting a single characteristic detail.

This unexpected return to a little-used (or disused?) genre such as still life can be explained by the very nature of Cubist expression, whose novelty lay mainly in the depicting form, rather than content.

(c) (R) 2012, MUSMon com S.L.