{"data":{"id":"190","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":190,"topgoose_id":2976,"tms_id":190,"display_name":"Patrick Henry Bruce","sort_name":"Bruce Patrick Henry","display_date":"1881–1936","begin_date":"1881","end_date":"1936","biography":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1904 Virginia-born Patrick Henry\nBruce moved to France, where he would\nreside for most of his life. Encountering\nthe fractured forms of Cubism there\nand the color experiments of his friends\nthe Orphist painters Sonia and Robert\nDelaunay, Bruce soon adopted bold hues\nand a geometric style. By 1912 he was\npainting abstracted still lifes, a genre that\nwould occupy him for the rest of his career.\nThough he was one of the few American\nartists to be embraced by the Parisian\navant-garde of the era, Bruce nonetheless\nbecame increasingly disillusioned and\nreclusive over the course of the 1920s and\ndestroyed much of his work before\ncommitting suicide in 1936.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2264\"\u003e\u003cem\u003ePainting\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003eis emblematic of the\narchitectonic style that Bruce developed\nin his last series of still-life paintings,\nproduced in the years following World War I.\nLike other works from this period, it focuses\nexclusively on objects from the private\nworld of the artist’s apartment studio.\nThe image is composed of quotidian objects—\nincluding a vase, a drinking glass, and a\nsliced orange—that have been organized\ninto flat planes of color and geometric\nvolumes, formed with the aid of mechanical\ndrawing tools. The white vertical bar on\nthe left-hand side—a device Bruce used\nfrequently in this period—creates the illusion\nthat the objects are set into a deep space,\neven as it simultaneously calls attention\nto the flatness of the canvas surface. With\nits sharply articulated forms and bold,\nunmodulated color, \u003cem\u003ePainting\u003c/em\u003e anticipates the\nhard-edged geometric abstraction adopted\nby successive generations of American\nartists in the 1930s and again in the 1950s.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":false,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500007545","wikidata_id":"Q1392667","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:41:13.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-31T07:02:32.643-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/190/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/190/exhibitions"}}}}