Balustre et crâne

A master of the still-life as few in the twentieth century could claim, Georges Braque saw himself as the heir of Chardin and Cézanne and ennobled the most mundane objects through a clear and implacably strict inner logic, the underpinnings of which were based on pictorial solutions he and Picasso had proposed when they created Cubism some twenty five years before Balustre et crâne. Braque wholly disregarded the prevailing tendencies toward Surrealism, Expressionism, and the return to Realism, and unlike Picasso--whose temperment and inventiveness enabled him to use or dispense with the components of any style imaginable with great abandon--Braque set about exclusively applying the constructs of Cubism, which was for him a limitless language, a fundamental rhetoric that could never be exhausted.

In Nature morte au pichet, Braque integrated disparate aspects of Cubism, notably the quasi-naturalistic sense of space and light found in Analytic Cubism and the muted color harmonies and planar qualities of Synthetic Cubism, thus producing a set of complex processes by which contrasts of texture could be rendered--a series of decisions John Russell has called Braque's "distributed sensuality...the sensuality marks on the canvas [combined] with the sensuality of the thing remembered". Abandoning voluptuous paint application and decorative nuancing, Braque's later works were an attempt to prove this maxim that "It isn't enough to make visible what you paint. You have to render it touchable" (quoted in J. Russell, G. Braque, London, 1959, p. 24).