The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Features Georges Braque Still Life Paintings
“The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.” ~Georges Braque~…
When considering the work of Georges Braque (1882-1963), we often limit our view of his contribution in art history to his role in the early development of Cubism. In that context, Braque’s artistic output become intertwined with that of his neighbor and collaborator, Pablo Picasso—especially during the period, 1908 to 1912—when they were living in the cold-water flats of Paris’s Montmartre district, They often traveled and painted together, treating the same landscape subject from the same fractured, multi-dimension perspective, and with similarly radical results. Recalling that period of controversial innovation, Braque later said, “The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain.”
Above: Vase, Palette and Mandolin (1936), oil, charcoal, graphite on canvas. Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. artes fine arts magazine
It is now nearly impossible to distinguish their respective contributions to Cubist painting as a style, or to the development of Braque’s inventive, multi-media collage techniques (papier collé)—also employed by Picasso with great success—as together, they shook the foundations of Western art in the early 20th century. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or “bizarre cubiques“, in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as ‘full of little cubes’, after which the term quickly gained wide use, although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture – that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” Their combined effort was key to the development of the Cubist movement, which spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe. But, ultimately, Picasso’s flamboyant lifestyle and notoriety gained momentum, soon overshadowing the quiet life of Braque.
Right: Pitcher and Violin (1910), oil on canvas. Collection, Kunstmuseum, Basel.
The current exhibit at the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, removes Braque from behind the shadow of Picasso and their signature parallel creations of the early years, giving Braque the much-deserved spotlight. The show is structured to present multiple groupings of closely-related works side-by-side, reinforcing the mastery behind Braque’s dedicated and focused attention to the still life, and to the methods and materiality of his later paintings. A slow, experiential viewing is central to appreciating and understanding his art, and the current show provides a rare opportunity to do just that. The exhibition is eye-opening for several reasons, principally for the complexity and intensity of his observational skills, as evidenced by the forty-two piece on display; but no less so because of the way in which he lovingly and skillfully redefines the Cubist genre, lending his own unique painterly voice to this well-known early-modernist movement.
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 is the first major U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to Braque in 16 years. Co-organized by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the exhibition is also the first to situate Braque’s work within the cultural and political upheavals leading up to, and through, World War II—a period largely overlooked in scholarship on this artist. Drawn from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, the exhibition explores the painter’s career following the early, pioneering days of Cubism and the neoclassical retour à l’ordre, but before the late series of large-scale paintings featuring billiard tables, birds and the atelier.
Above, right: Pitcher, Pitcher and Newspaper (The Greek Vase), 1928, oil on canvas. Collection, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Following their earliest collaboration, the lives of Braque and Picasso diverged in more than one way, as Braque went off to fight for the French in World War I, sustaining a head injury at the battle of Carency, in 1915. But, not even temporary blindness and a long recovery period would discourage him, and Braque was painting again, late in 1916. After relocating to the region of his birth on the Normandy seacoast—and with Picasso’s influence now at a distance—Braque began to experiment with cubist methods. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism, developing a more personal style, characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and the reappearance of the human figure. He continued to paint still lifes during this time, however, maintaining his particular emphasis on structure.
It seems fitting that the Phillips Collection should serve as a venue for this exhibition, since its founding director, Duncan Phillips (1886-1966), son of a Pittsburgh industrialist and heir to that fortune, played an early role in promoting the art of Georges Braque in the U.S. He was one of a network of museum directors, collectors, critics and dealers who would introduce European modernism to a larger American audience. Phillips saw in Braque a kindred spirit, an independent mind with ties to tradition. He saw his role as an arbiter of progressive tastes to find, “the independent artist and stand sponsor for him against the herd mind.” Between 1921 and 1966 he oversaw the acquisition of eleven paintings by Braque, including works like The Round Table (1929), an innovation work that marked a transition in the artist’s oeuvre.
Left: The Round Table (1929), oil, sand, charcoal on canvas. Collection, The Phillips Collection.
Regarding the advantages of still life painting, Braque explained that he “… began to concentrate on still-lifes, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space… This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them… In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life” A still life was also more accessible, in relation to perspective, than landscape, and permitted the artist to see the multiple perspectives of the object. Braque’s early interest in still lifes revived during the 1930s.
During the period between the wars, Braque exhibited a freer style of Cubism, intensifying his color use and a looser rendering of objects. However, he still remained committed to the cubist method of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. In contrast to Picasso, who continuously reinvented his style of painting, producing both representational and cubist images, and incorporating surrealist ideas into his work, Braque continued in the Cubist style, producing luminous, other-worldly still life and figure compositions.
Right: Still Life with a Fruit Dish (1936), oil on canvas. Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty “… in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty [he] interpret[s] [his] subjective impression…” He described “objects shattered into fragments… [as] a way of getting closest to the object…Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space”. Braque had adopted a monochromatic and neutral color palette in his earlier works, in the belief that such a palette would emphasize the subject matter. These later paintings embody a form-in-color, as if muted by cool, gauzy Normandy coastal light; edges sharpened; objects occupying equal visual weight in the composition; with sensations heightened, as his complex structure of form, line and color invite the eye to move in an endless course through the composition, in search of a resting point.
On important element in many of Braque’s paintings—adding to their perceived depth and approachability—is his technique for applying a ground layer to the canvas before beginning to paint. These were of two types: white and black. White ground, a highly textured material recalling stucco or fresco, was applied methodically. “I prepare the ground of my canvases with the utmost care, for it is the ground that supports the entire picture, like the foundation of a house.” About half of the paintings in the exhibition were prepared with either white or black ground. Black ground added a sense of depth and atmosphere, as their matte, unsaturated surfaces highlighted the flatness of the picture plane. Fine grains of variegated sand, both sparsely mixed with paint and scattered on top, further emphasized the materiality of the surface. The artist rarely covered the entire undersurface of his painting, allowing portions of the texture to become part of the finished composition. The black ground is incorporated into The Napkin Ring (1929), serving as the base color for the blue and green veins of the marbled background and as the color of the table, otherwise defined only by an outline of yellow paint.
Right: Washstand before a Window (1942), oil on canvas. Collection, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
During the 1930s, as Braque experimented with a more colorful palette, he used black ground less frequently, but he returned to it in the 1940s. The Washstand and Pewter Pot and Plate of Fruit, both from 1944, are examples of later works in which the artist-prepared black ground were applied to the bare canvases. The grounds are characteristically matte, textured with sand, and visible throughout the composition. On both canvases, the ground layer paint was fluid when applied, as evidenced by drips on the tacking edges.
The exhibit contains a number of firsts. For the first time in more than 80 years, Braque’s “Rosenberg Quartet” (1928-29), created for his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, is here reunited. Another grouping features The Blue Mandolin, Still Life with Glass and Still Life with Fruit Dish, Bottle, and Mandolin, all completed in 1930. Though depicting similar objects—guéridon tables, mandolins, compote bowls—the three paintings are executed in distinct palettes and from different vantage points. The effect is to highlight Braque’s gift for rendering familiar worlds unfamiliar, or even hallucinatory.
Left: Still Life with Fruit Dish, Bottle and Mandolin (1930), oil on canvas. Collection, Kunstsannlung Nordheim-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.
In the 1930s, as the rise of fascism brought new urgency to questions of aesthetics and politics — questions that entered mainstream consciousness with Picasso’s Guernica (1937) — Braque’s fractured still lifes and bourgeois interiors remained emphatically inward-looking. Yet Braque’s painting was not as separate from outside events as Braque might have it. While his attention to the private, secluded realm of the still life suggests disengagement with historical and political circumstances, the paintings themselves convey a more complex narrative. Indeed, the artist’s exactingly internal gaze was precisely what made his work relevant to questions of art, engagement and responsibility.
For Braque’s supporters, his emphasis on creating unfamiliar worlds represented no less than a manifesto of human freedom and an attempt to break free from history and civilization. Carl Einstein, the German Jewish art historian who organized Braque’s first major retrospective — and who relocated to Paris in 1928 to edit the journal Documents with Georges Bataille — initially planned to title his 1934 monograph on Braque “La morale de la pureté (The morality of purity).”
But the war years proved difficult for the painter’s circle. In 1940, Rosenberg left Paris for New York as the Nazis seized his gallery, paintings and residence. Shortly thereafter, Einstein committed suicide in the French Pyrenees while fleeing the Gestapo, and Braque himself stopped painting for a time. Conversely, under the occupation government, other contemporaries judged Braque’s still lifes as sufficiently apolitical to be featured in a special exhibit as part of the 1943, Salon d’automne.
In addition to situating his work within the period’s cultural and political debates, Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945, provides unique insight into the artist’s creative process. Employing x-ray and other technical analysis, conservators reveal Braque’s manipulation of pigments and materials as well as his practice of continually reworking canvases. Still Life with Palette (1943), for example, is revealed to contain an entirely different composition beneath its final surface.
Left: Still Life with Palette (1943), oil on canvas. Collection, Saint Louis Art Museum.
Other highlights include The Baluster and Skull / Still Life with Fruit Dish (1938), a rarely seen double-sided painting. For Braque, the skull represented both a new motif and a powerful evocation of the traditional Vanitas, with its critique of worldly pleasure and emphasis on the inevitability of death. Yet Braque’s symbolism remained layered and ambiguous. Though arguably an oblique reference to war, his skulls also often echo the shape of a painter’s palette. If mortality is invoked, it could well be Braque’s own — yet another example of the inward nature of the artist’s vision.
Recalling again, Phillips’s enthusiasm for the work of this artist, he wrote that, “Braque belongs to the family of great French painters who mastered their instrument because they were born of them.” Even before the 1920s, Braque had shifted away from high Analytical Cubism to embrace the “return to order” movement in art, which rejected extreme experimentation and re-established traditional aesthetic values deemed lost in the chaos of World War I.
Far right: Baluster and Skull (1938), oil on canvas (recto); below, right: Still Life with Fruit Dish (1932-33), oil on canvas (verso). Private collection. *Not on view at The Phillips Collection exhibit.
This change in Braque’s work pleased Phillips, because it suited his classical taste. Phillips had once dismissed Cubism as mere “zigzags and criss-crosses on a bare surface.” Braque’s renewed emphasis on the natural appearance of objects gave his pictures greater weight and physical substance, as well as an immediacy and intimacy associated with touch. He explained the importance of ground in his work in reality: “To arrive at abstraction one must start from nature…if one loses contact with nature, one will end fatally in decoration.
Phillips understood Braque’s use of abstraction in these works: “From nature Braque made abstractions full of subtly reasoned, exquisitely-tuned relationships.” From the perspective of a 21st century visitor to the exhibition—well-acquainted with the conventions of early modernism—similar reasoning can be applied to explain the timeless appeal of Braque’s mid-career work: his abstractions metamorphose nature in ways that are both finely-tuned, freshly compelling and revelatory.
By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 is curated by Karen K. Butler, assistant curator at the Kemper Art Museum, and by Renée Maurer, assistant curator at The Phillips Collection. The exhibition is currently on view at The Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C., where it will be on view until September 1, 2013.
Visit the museum on line at www.phillipscollection.org
Or purchase the 240-page, richly illustrated catalogue at their on-line gift shop for $49.95:
http://shop.phillipscollection.org/browse.cfm/george-braque-and-the-cubists-still-life/4,370.html
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life (1928–1945) features 44 sumptuous canvases by the great French cubist master George Braque (1882–1963) from the tumultuous years leading up and through World War II, a time of great experimentation for the artist. The exhibition reveals insights into his creative process at a time when he used the motif of still life as a source of inspiration to synthesize cubist discoveries. In-depth technical analysis of several works uncovers details about Braque’s meticulous use of materials and his interest in creating a tactile painted surface.
The fully illustrated 240-page exhibition catalog is published by The Phillips Collection and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, in collaboration with Delmonico Prestel. It includes essays by exhibition co-curators Renee Maurer of The Phillips Collection and Karen K. Butler of the Kemper Art Museum. Phillips Associate Conservator Patricia Favero co-authored a study of Braque’s materials and process with Erin Mysak, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in conservation science at Harvard Art Museums, and Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist at Harvard’s Straus Center for Conservation.
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