George Braque’s painting Fruit Dish and Glass (1912) is most notable for being the first papier collé

Papier collé

Papier collé is a painting technique and type of collage. With papier collé the artist pastes pieces of flat material into a painting in much in the same way as a collage, except the shape of the pasted pieces are objects themselves...

. Braque was inspired to create this piece after visiting an Avignon

Avignon

Avignon is a French commune in southeastern France in the départment of the Vaucluse bordered by the left bank of the Rhône river. Of the 94,787 inhabitants of the city on 1 January 2010, 12 000 live in the ancient town centre surrounded by its medieval ramparts.Often referred to as the...

 shop where he purchased a roll of faux bois

Faux Bois

Faux bois refers to the artistic imitation of wood or wood grains in various media. The craft has roots in the Renaissance with trompe-l'œil. It was probably first crafted with concrete using a steel armature by the inventor of ferrocement, Joseph Monier. In 1875, Monier created the first bridge...

 paper, simulating oak paneling and consisting of two kinds of printed motifs on a dark beige background. Braque may have been drawn to this paper because he was trained in a technique called trompe-l'oeil; which allowed him to create pictorial effects that resemble woodgrain and marble finishes, but are made with paint and a special wide comb. Braque then may have found it amusing to incorporate the woodgrain paper in his piece. He may also have wished to use the paper to create a visual pun

Visual pun

A visual pun is a pun involving an image or images .Visual puns in which the image is at odds with the inscription are common in Dutch gable stones as well as in cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side...

 about the nature of representation. He noticed that because the paper looks realistic and yet it is flat, and pasted on, it undermines spatial relationships. It can act as the foreground, the background, or both. When first observing Fruit Dish and Glass, one might recognize a glass filled with grapes and pears, but these elements are flattened and distorted versions of actual objects. Rather than trying to accurately represent reality, Braque is playing with textures

Texture (visual arts)

In the visual arts, texture is the perceived surface quality of a work of art. It is an element of two-dimensional and three-dimensional design and is distinguished by its perceived visual and physical properties...

, shapes

Shape

The shape of an object located in some space is a geometrical description of the part of that space occupied by the object, as determined by its external boundary – abstracting from location and orientation in space, size, and other properties such as colour, content, and material...

, and composition

Composition (visual arts)

In the visual arts – in particular painting, graphic design, photography and sculpture – composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art or a photograph, as distinct from the subject of a work...

 to construct a painting that is half recognizable and half symbolic. Indeed, reality is invoked in phrase-like fragments, like a sentence, which combine to create a rich constellation of meanings.

Process

The piece is based on the interaction of wallpaper glued to the support and charcoal lines, which evoke both objects and words. The subject matter is a glass bowl, pears, and grapes, between what looks like a dish and a wine glass, or perhaps a candlestick. Braque probably began the work by cutting out pieces of wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a kind of material used to cover and decorate the interior walls of homes, offices, and other buildings; it is one aspect of interior decoration. It is usually sold in rolls and is put onto a wall using wallpaper paste...

 and moving them around a flat surface to imagine his composition. He then might have positioned two strips of the wood grain wallpaper vertically on a large sheet of white paper to signify the walls of a café. He also put a small horizontal piece of wallpaper at the bottom of the paper to represent a table top. Then, he drew the glass, pears, grapes and the words ‘ALE’ and ‘BAR’ in charcoal and added black lines in ink to the wallpaper, and a circular knob to the horizon piece of wallpaper at the bottom to make it look like the drawer of a table. The work has a variety of textures that add confusion to spatial relations of the objects in the composition. For example, in addition to the oak wallpaper, Braque used a comb to add an additional element of trompe-l'oeil to give the piece even more perceptual distortion. Braque also adds texture, applying a mix of sand and gesso

Gesso

Gesso is a white paint mixture consisting of a binder mixed with chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these...

to the background. This texture brings the background forward, making it more difficult to interpret the perspective. Braque’s process was deliberately mystifying. His technique is full of subtleties that one doesn't notice at first. Both the physical and logical relationships of the objects are often difficult to construct. The painting is a visual puzzle which challenges the viewer to understand what is shown from clues and fragments.

Interpreting

In some places, the charcoal

Charcoal

Charcoal is the dark grey residue consisting of carbon, and any remaining ash, obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents from animal and vegetation substances. Charcoal is usually produced by slow pyrolysis, the heating of wood or other substances in the absence of oxygen...

 drawing overlaps the large vertical pieces of wallpaper so that the viewer can’t tell what is in the foreground and what is in the background. In doing so Braque is making a pun about the way objects are contained in space. In Braque’s world, objects can float next to the table and be all in one plane and in a third dimension all at once. In reality, the individual pieces are flat and meaningless, and then are built on one another to become somewhat dimensional and visually meaningful.

History

Braque first thought of creating these sorts of logical paradoxes after spotting a roll of faux-bois paper printed like oak paneling. He saw the paper in an Avignon shop while traveling with Picasso and his companion, Eva Gouel, in Sorgues

Sorgues

Sorgues is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.It is also the name of a river running through the area. The Sorgues River is a tributary of the Rhone which begins at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse....

. Braque said that he eyed the paper but waited to act on his ideas until Picasso gone to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Picasso was going to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 for a week to organize his move to a new apartment on 242 Boulevard Raspail. After Picasso had left, Braque bought the paper and made several works starting with Fruit Dish and Glass. When Picasso returned, Braque showed him his work; later, Picasso copied the technique. The work was purchased by one of Braque’s first collectors, Wilhelm Uhde

Wilhelm Uhde

Wilhelm Uhde was a German art collector, dealer, author and critic, an early collector of modernist painting, and a significant figure in the career of Henri Rousseau.-Biography:...

. The piece remained with Uhde until 1921, when it was sold to a private collection. The use of collage is usually credited with changing the face of cubism from analytic to synthetic. Analytic cubism used lines or tones to represent the world, while synthetic often used collage or painted areas resembling collage. These new devices created a constant tension between illusion and the use of real objects.