Blue Guitar

Georges Braque, along with Picasso, was one of the originators of Cubism, a style of painting that celebrated the flatness of the painting's support and dissolved solid forms-often of everyday objects, or landscapes-into planes of relatively somber, complementary colors, sometimes accompanied with enigmatic lettering and wood-grain effects.

This still life of a guitar on a table, accompanied by a pitcher and bunch of grapes, was exhibited in the Salon d'Automne exhibition in Paris shortly after it was painted. It was singled out for praise in London's Sunday Times in 1960 by art critic John Russell, writing about works in US college and university museums that had no parallel for quality in their counterpart museums in England. The painting displays the dark tonality that characterized Braque's works made during the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, with small passages of brighter yellow and peach colors. The layered and textured surfaces are typical of the artist's work at this time.

The painting was purchased by the AMAM from Theodore Schempp, an Oberlin College graduate of 1928, who became a dealer of important French and modern European works of art in the early 1930s. The first painting he ever sold, a Bust of a Woman by André Derain, was purchased by the AMAM in 1933.