Still LIfe with Big Bear 1926

Louis Marcoussis made this Still Life with Big Bear, with who-knows-what – I imagine oils maybe, or gouache, something matte. He builds up from blocks of colour, like a low-res image, into a dense still life. It's a formal puzzle – the kind I love to solve. The piece is so flat, so opaque. Look at how those shapes just butt up against each other, no soft edges, no blending. It's like he's saying, "Here are the pieces, now you figure it out." Take that fish, for example. It’s floating inside what looks like a face, but it’s also just a red shape with white polka dots. How does that fit in? What does it mean? It's a bit of a dare, I think, daring us to make sense of it all. Marcoussis was part of that whole Cubist conversation, riffing off Picasso and Braque. But he brings something different, a kind of playful abstraction that feels fresh even now. It reminds me of the way Elizabeth Murray would play with shapes and space – this idea of a painting being a bunch of parts that never quite add up, and yet, somehow, they do.