MAN WITH A GUITAR
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1912
Alright, so. Try to find the guitar. Take your time. It's in there. The man too, somewhere in that pile of gray-brown planes. Now look at the top left corner. There's a nail. Little coil of rope hanging off it, painted so sharp you could reach up and unhook it. A whole man, broken into a hundred shards, and the realest thing in here is the nail. Not the guy. Braque loved this move. One perfect little real-world thing, almost hiding in there. Pretty great, right? Now think about what a guitar even is. It's a music thing. And music, you never get all at once. You hear one note, then the next, then the next, and somewhere in there your brain glues it into a song. You never hold the whole thing. It's always in pieces, always moving. So Braque looks at that and goes, fine. That's how I'll paint it. In pieces. Over time. He's making your eyes do what your ears already do. And maybe that's why the nail's there. The one thing that won't move, while everything else is basically sound. It's like something to grab onto. And look at that rope again. The real one, on the nail. Because by now Braque and Picasso are so deep into this together you can't tell whose hand did what. Studios down the street. Every day. Same problem, two guys coming at it from opposite sides. He called it being "two mountaineers, roped together." Then 1914. The war calls him up. A year later he gets a bullet to the head. Somehow he survives, but he's gone from painting for months, and by the time he's back, Picasso's moved on without him. But that rope, it's still there hanging on the nail.