Peinture/Nature Morte is one of 25 related still-life paintings that Patrick Henry Bruce created in his Paris apartment from 1917 through 1930 [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Photo of Patrick Henry Bruce's Paris apartment, c. 1917–1918. Courtesy of William Agee and B. F. Garber. In this series, Bruce synthesized geometric forms in a shallow but legible pictorial space. The artist abstracted the horizontal plane in the Gallery’s painting from one of four antique tables he owned, only part of which is shown to suggest that it continues beyond the canvas. Although reduced to a balanced selection of geometric solids, the household objects depicted on the table are still recognizable: drinking glasses, mortars and pestles from the artist’s collection of African art, drafting tools, and wooden moldings and magnets used to secure drawings to a table or wall. All these objects are simplified to produce a composition in which specificity is irrelevant and formal relationships are emphasized. In this regard, Bruce’s composition shares traits with the avant-garde movement known as purism, whose leaders, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Amédée Ozenfant, called for an art of synthesis in contrast to what they considered the disjointed, haphazard nature of analytic cubism.
A Virginia-born descendant of the Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry, Bruce trained in New York with William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 - 1916) in 1901 and Robert Henri (American, 1865 - 1929) in 1903. During this formative period, he also spent time with friends Edward Hopper (American, 1882 - 1967) and Guy Pène du Bois (American, 1884 - 1958). In 1903 he moved to Paris to continue his studies, returning briefly to the United States in 1905 to marry fellow artist and Chase student Helen Kibbey. The couple moved to Paris before the year’s end, and Bruce remained there for more than 30 years.
Bruce’s initial artistic explorations in Paris led him to the Musée du Louvre to study the old masters. Like his contemporaries who had studied with Chase, he honed his skills by copying portraits in the Louvre’s galleries, and his first exhibited works in Paris were full-length portraits inspired by these studies. He grew acquainted with the Paris school of modernists through Gertrude and Leo Stein, who introduced him to Henri Matisse (French, 1869 - 1954). Bruce partnered with Gertrude and Leo’s sister-in-law Sarah Stein to organize the Matisse School, which opened in 1908. His involvement with the school brought him into daily contact with Matisse, who encouraged him to study the work of Paul Cézanne (French, 1839 - 1906) and Auguste Renoir (French, 1841 - 1919), two artists whose work remained extremely important to the American throughout his career. The palette of Peinture/Nature Morte—pinks, greens, pale yellow, purple, and blue—is testament to Bruce’s exposure to Matisse, as well as to his reading about the law of simultaneous contrasts, developed by 19th-century French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, which states that if two colors are juxtaposed, each will be influenced by the complement of the other. After 1912, Bruce’s work was exhibited and discussed in conjunction with that of the Orphic cubists Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, 1885 - 1979, active France) and Robert Delaunay (French, 1885 - 1941), who promoted the idea that movement and recession in space could be created solely through contrasts of color.
Although Bruce’s career began with great promise and focus, his professional and personal stability unraveled over time. During the 1920s, when he painted Peinture/Nature Morte, he increasingly isolated himself. He wrote, “I am doing all my traveling in the apartment on ten canvases. One visits many unknown countries that way.” He did not have a dealer and was famously reticent. Bruce lost confidence in his abilities as he entered middle age and destroyed much of his work in 1933. His lack of direction was exacerbated by his struggle with failing health, financial difficulties, and a dissolving marriage. His only art world supporter of note was the French author Henri-Pierre Roché, who promoted Bruce and other avant-garde artists to American collectors (and to whom Bruce gave 21 still lifes from this late series, including this one, in 1933).
The serial approach that Bruce used when making Peinture/Nature Morte and the related still lifes was part of a larger trend in modernist painting, but it likely also reveals a more private process of personal searching. Given the difficulties Bruce was facing when he painted Peinture/Nature Morte, perhaps the series indicates the influence of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, including Cézanne and Claude Monet (French, 1840 - 1926), who used repetition to create meaning. Bruce’s sustained work on this series— from 1917 to 1930—may also indicate his continued longing for control. Peinture/Nature Morte belongs to the fifth and most compositionally complex of six stylistically distinct groups in this still life series; within each group, Bruce progressively removed one or two elements to distill and simplify the composition. Dating to about 1924, the four paintings in this group are characterized by an inverted V above the table and a background of pronounced geometric architectural elements. On a personal level, Bruce never achieved the sense of balance that these paintings worked toward; his life ended tragically in suicide when he was 55 years old.
Dorothy Moss
September 29, 2016
