The few objects in the foreground - glass, fruit, pipe and knife, which also appear in several works of the year before - are gathered together in the centre of the composition, isolated in the space, connected and incorporated by swollen and flattened shapes. 

After the birth of Cubism and creative friendship with Pablo Picasso, the interruption of World War I and the full resumption of painting in 1917, Georges Braque laid the foundations for stylistic evolution in the late 1920s. Raisins, pipe et verre (Grapes, Pipe and Glass) is one of a series of simply structured still lifes painted between 1931 and 1934, both small and large, introducing a number of recent formal innovations. First, he creates these ambiguous organic shapes of a surreal character adopted in the Bathers series (c. 1928-29), some of which he destroyed and others he later altered; then he incises slender lines into the works of black-painted plaster produced in 1931 using a technique of his own invention. Finally he uses a free graphic line, tending towards the arabesque, that imparts compositional rhythm to the sixteen etchings of mythological scenes from Hesiod’s Theogony commissioned by Ambroise Vollard (1932-35). In Raisins, pipe et verre, the white outline of the glass is superimposed on the black, abstract form in an interplay of transparencies that is a recurrent feature of the works of the period, where the pictorial substance appears weightless. The catalogue of Braque’s paintings¹ includes another six similar still lifes from 1933. The few objects in the foreground - glass, fruit, pipe and knife, which also appear in several works of the year before - are gathered together in the centre of the composition, isolated in the space, connected and incorporated by swollen and flattened shapes. Similar fluid forms, present also in larger and more complex canvases like Grande nature morte brune (Large Brown Still Life, 1932, Centre Pompidou, Paris), are interwoven as though in marquetry to create an organic whole. Fritz Laufer sees the white pipe in Raisins, pipe et verre as a possible citation of Jean- Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.² Resting on a surface barely distinguishable from the background, the objects stand out against an indefinite neutral colour, a glowing greyish pink that constitutes an addition to the artist’s somewhat austere palette of the period, comprising white, black, grey, brown, chestnut red and green, applied in thin layers. The still lives were joined in 1932 and 1933 by a smaller number of seascapes painted in Normandy, where Braque spent all his summers as from 1929. 1933 also saw his first major retrospective, held at the Kunsthalle in Basel with a study by Carl Einstein in the catalogue, as well as a monographic issue of Cahiers d’art (no. 1-2) devoted to his work with a number of articles, some of which previously unpublished. This marked the opening of a new period for Braque, continuing all through the decade and beyond, in which decoration came to saturate the space, glowing colours were adopted and surfaces crammed with objects and ornamental elements accentuated the dynamism and metamorphic malleability suggested in previous years. 

Raisins, pipe et verre belonged to the Milanese collectors Emilio and Maria Jesi, who bought it from the Galleria Il Milione, Milan, in 1961 and lent it to the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin for the exhibition La pittura moderna straniera nelle collezioni private italiane (with other works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Utrillo, Picasso, Poliakoff, Bissière, Vieira da Silva and Singier). The painting can be seen, in a frame different from the present one, in the installation views of the exhibition now in the Archivio Fotografico della Fondazione Torino Musei. Cerruti’s library includes a copy of the catalogue together with a card and dedication from Pier Giovanni Castagnoli (director of the Museo Civico from 1998 to 2008). The painting still belonged to a private collection in Milan in 1971.³ 

Valeria D’Urso

¹ Mangin 1959-82, vol. III, 1928-35, foglio no. 100, ill.

² Laufer 1954, p. 24.

³ Valsecchi, Carrà 1971, p. 106.