the mandolin, painted by braque in 1910, shows just how subtle cubist art can be.t's very different from les demoiselles, quieter, much more difficult to decipher. the eye oscillates between hints of a mandolin and a jug-- dislocated by multiple perspective-- and a structure of glinting shards, or planes, scattered right across the picture's surface. many people--british critic roger fry, for instance-- thought pictures like this totally abstract. they only saw the structures of planes. certainly, it can seem, in a figure painting like this by picasso, that the geometric structure of planes is antagonistic to any normal perception of the subject and that, eventually, it must completely cloak the subject, @@ take over. but, actually, picasso's and braque's cubism never broke with representation. what such pictures said was that painting is not a mirror held up to the world, but a language, a language of mark and shape-making, of structuring on a flat surface, whose means are infinitely variable, but which has a power to represent things grasped in space in all their