Bass

Braque’s earliest experiments in printmaking were probably inspired by Picasso’s saltimbanques from 1904-05, although his first etching was somewhat out of character, a standing nude, perhaps related to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. However, he turned increasingly to still-life subjects as he developed his Cubist style, culminating in such works as Bass. One of the most obvious features of his Cubist prints is the inclusion of words such as “Vin” and “Bass” which serve to flatten the surface and define the various planes within the image. Most likely this use of words evolved from Braque’s love of poster art, the work of Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec he had grown up with, with their imaginative use of text within the image. In most cases the words in Braque’s prints refer to obvious brand names or specific things while seeming to have only a peripheral connection to the subject being portrayed. Braque uses a rich drypoint line, scratched, hatched, and reworked, to add to the lush quality of his surfaces. As in his collages, he plays with textures, mimicking wood grain and paint strokes alike, in imitation of his canvases. Although he made several plates during this period, only two, Fox and Job, were printed before the War. The rest languished in his studio until the late 1940s, when William Lieberman found them and encouraged Braque to have them printed. In 1950 Bass was printed by Georges Visat in an edition of fifty for the publisher Galerie Maeght. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)