Patrick Henry Bruce

American artist, one of the first Cubists in the United States.

He was the second of four children of a famous American lawyer and speaker, and a former planter. Relatives of the artist were large landowners, but lost most of the plantations after the Civil War.

Working primarily in France, Patrick Bruce invented an original abstract technique based on the achievements of Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia and the Delaunay couple. A regular participant of the “Autumn Salon”, “Salon of Independent” and other influential exhibitions in Europe, he was well known in the circles of the creative intellectuals of Paris. However, despite the artist’s participation in the famous American Armory Exhibition in 1913, his work remained almost unnoticed in his homeland. This led to the fact that Bruce, being very self-critical, destroyed most of his works in a fit of despair and committed suicide in a hotel in New York a few years later. No more than a hundred of his works were preserved. They attest to his original approach to painting and outstanding talent. They are in the best museums in the USA.

The most famous author’s works are a series of geometric still lifes called “Painting” or “Forms”, created in the 1920s. In these paintings, various elements overlap and join at different angles, which creates an illusory space on the flat surface of the canvas and opens several points of view at the same time.

Key ideas:

– Most of Bruce’s works are strict geometric compositions made in an unusual color scheme.

– The artist preferred to work with still lifes, which he portrayed extremely rationally and even drily. A variety of fruits, a glass with a straw, kitchenware are presented on Bruce’s canvases in the form of perfect, incredibly simplified forms.

– There is a strict order and visual harmony in all the pictures by the American author. Block structures of Bruce’s paintings create monumental architectural volumes, accentuated by rhythmic lines and color contrasts.

– The harmonious compositions of the artist create an impression of silence and tranquility. In contrast to the still lifes of Picasso and Braque, there is no division into individual small fragments in Bruce’s works, but there is rather, on the contrary, the unification of disparate planes into one.

– A distinguishing feature of the artist’s work is the visible carcass of geometric figures, which he drew with a pencil before applying paints. In many canvases, the artist intentionally leaves these areas completely or partially unpainted, and the rest are filled with a dense, uniform color. This technique enhances the volume effect and perspective in the picture, and also helps avoid the visual congestion of the composition.

– The color scale used in his work amazes with unusual combinations of pastel blue, turquoise and lilac, harmoniously intertwined in rational Cubist language. Patrick Bruce’s paintings are a vivid example of the artist’s individual approach to the existing artistic trends and their non-standard interpretation.