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George Braque as a cubist

George Braque as a Cubist

2005

From the positions of art critiques and historians , in the second half of the twentieth century , Cubism emerges clearly as one of the major transformations in Western art . As revolutionary as the discoveries of Einstein or Freud , the discoveries of Cubism controverted principles that had prevailed in art for centuries . For the traditional distinction between solid form and the space around it , Cubism substituted a radically new fusion of mass and void . In place of earlier perspective systems that determined the precise location of discrete

objects in illusory depth , Cubism offered an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminate spatial positions . Instead of assuming that the work of art was an illusion of a reality that lay beyond it , Cubism proposed that the work of art was itself a reality that represented the very process by which nature is transformed into art . Primarily , Cubism in its pure formed emerged from the activity of two artists , Picasso and Braque , and by 1920 , with the strange destiny of history , viewpoints of these painters had converged so closely that their respective works of this time can be distinguished by connoisseurs alone

From the time of their first meeting in 1907 until about 1914 , the art of the two men followed a closely interrelated course that for several years attained a disciplined vocabulary that subordinated individual eccentricities to a comparatively objective standard . From the very beginning of artistic career , George Braque became fascinated with the problems raised by the coloristic outburst of Matisse , Derain , and Vlaminck at the Salon d 'Automne (Schmeller , 39 . As a Frenchman who had come to Paris from Le Havre in 1900 , Braque could hardly have been less like Picasso in back-ground . While Picasso was painting scenes of allegory and human despair , Braque worked within the confines of the Impressionist viewpoint , painting candidly observed landscapes and still lifes . By 1906 , he had given his temporary allegiance to the coloristic exuberance of the Fauves , producing such works as the landscape at L 'Estaque . Yet here , in historical retrospect , one can already perceive a certain insistence on the analysis of solids that distinguishes Braque from his fellow Fauves and allies him more closely to the structural bent of Cyzanne , who had earlier scrutinized this same Provencal landscape in terms of its volumetric fundamentals (Raynal et al , 60 And in the following year , 1907 , Braque painted another of Cyzanne sites , the Viaduct at L 'Estaque ' in which the angular definition of planes in the central vista of earth , bridge , and houses grows even more emphatic (Raynal et al , 61 , especially by contrast with the looser definition of the trees that frame the view

Perhaps the first explicit statement of the mutual influence of Braque and Picasso may be seen in Braque Large Nude ' of 1907-8 , which clearly pays homage to Picasso 's Les Demoiselles d 'Avignon ' Such a painting , however , was exceptional in Braque 's oeuvre . Wisely , he concentrated on those subjects which corresponded to his French...

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