WOMAN WITH A MANDOLIN
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1937
All right, start with her face. At first, the woman and the chair are one flat black shape. But get closer. The profile, the eye, the lines running down her dress. They look drawn. One thin pale line running through all that black. That line has a history. A few years earlier, Braque had started painting slabs of plaster black and cutting white lines into them. He got the idea from ancient Greek vases in the Louvre. Dark ground, pale line. Here he brings the same trick into oil. She looks scratched out of the dark. Now the room. Green on green. Pattern on pattern. A mirror up top with its own little still life living inside it. Basically a Matisse with the lights turned off. There's sheet music on the stand, more on the table. Get close and try to read it. You can't. The notes are just little dashes. Even the mandolin is nearly gone, black on black in her lap, barely an outline. The warmest thing in the whole painting is a little yellow caught in her hair. Then you notice what he wrote in the corner. 1937. That April, German and Italian planes spend an afternoon bombing a Basque town called Guernica. Market day, streets full. Three quarters of it gone. Nobody could agree how many died. Picasso takes that afternoon and paints it the size of a wall. Everybody knows that one. Braque, same city, same year, paints this. A woman holding still. A dark room. Music with the sound off. He already knew what a war could do to a head. In the last one, shrapnel from a shell tore into his skull. He was left for dead on the battlefield. A surgeon cut a hole in his head to relieve the pressure, and he didn't wake up for two days. He never said what happened next had anything to do with that. But the following year, his still lifes begin to change. Same dark rooms. Same tables. One new thing sitting on them. A skull. It doesn't leave for years.