Patrick Henry Bruce
1881–1936
In 1904 Virginia-born Patrick Henry Bruce moved to France, where he would reside for most of his life. Encountering the fractured forms of Cubism there and the color experiments of his friends the Orphist painters Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Bruce soon adopted bold hues and a geometric style. By 1912 he was painting abstracted still lifes, a genre that would occupy him for the rest of his career. Though he was one of the few American artists to be embraced by the Parisian avant-garde of the era, Bruce nonetheless became increasingly disillusioned and reclusive over the course of the 1920s and destroyed much of his work before committing suicide in 1936.
Painting is emblematic of the architectonic style that Bruce developed in his last series of still-life paintings, produced in the years following World War I. Like other works from this period, it focuses exclusively on objects from the private world of the artist’s apartment studio. The image is composed of quotidian objects— including a vase, a drinking glass, and a sliced orange—that have been organized into flat planes of color and geometric volumes, formed with the aid of mechanical drawing tools. The white vertical bar on the left-hand side—a device Bruce used frequently in this period—creates the illusion that the objects are set into a deep space, even as it simultaneously calls attention to the flatness of the canvas surface. With its sharply articulated forms and bold, unmodulated color, Painting anticipates the hard-edged geometric abstraction adopted by successive generations of American artists in the 1930s and again in the 1950s.
Introduction
Patrick Henry Bruce (March 25, 1881 – November 12, 1936) was an American cubist painter.
Wikidata identifier
Q1392667
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 23, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500007545
Names
Patrick Henry Bruce, Bruce
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 23, 2025.
