Still Life with a Glass of Wine

In the 1920s Derain kept returning to a problem he summed up in one blunt sentence. Colour and line, he said, used at the same time cancel each other out and lose all expression. This small still life from 1928, about half a metre wide, tests the idea object by object. The bread and the pears are built only from contrasts, light against dark, warm colour against cool, with no line around them. The glass of wine and the red grapes at the top of the dish work the other way, held together by thin strokes of white or black drawn over the paint. Everything sits on a warm brown table under a hard light that throws long dark shadows. Derain signed it in the lower right corner, and the dealer Paul Guillaume owned it by 1929, the year after it was painted.