Violin and Candlestick

A violin and a candlestick are shattered and reassembled into a dense, shifting scaffold of faceted brown and grey planes, the objects barely legible amid the fractured geometry. Georges Braque painted this at the height of Analytic Cubism, when he and Picasso pushed their joint invention toward near-abstraction, dissolving solid things into a shimmering web of overlapping facets. Now in San Francisco, Violin and Candlestick shows the radical new way of seeing - a single object viewed from many angles at once, depth and volume rebuilt as a flat, crystalline structure on the canvas.