Georges Braque – Theiere et Fruits

Description

Georges Braque, Theiere et Fruits is a Spitzer collotype in colors on Arches wove paper. Signed and numbered in pencil from the edition of 150 with the Publisher’s blindstamp. Published by Guy Spitzer, Paris.

French painter, collagist and sculptor Georges Braque is, along with Pablo Picasso, renowned as the co-founder of Cubism, which revolutionized 20th-century painting. In his work, objects are fragmented and reconstructed into geometric forms, fracturing the picture plane in order to explore a variety of viewpoints. “The hard-and-fast rules of perspective … were a ghastly mistake which…has taken four centuries to redress,” he said in 1957. Merging aspects of the sculptural with the pictorial, Braque was also an innovator in the use of collage, inventing a technique known as papier collé, which he first explored in one early work Fruit Dish and Glass (1912) by attaching pieces of wallpaper to a charcoal drawing. This approach deeply influenced not only his contemporaries but generations of artists from Modernism to the present.

Picasso and Braque worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I, upon which Braque joined the French Amy and left Picasso’s side. After his return from the war, in which he was seriously wounded in the battlefield, Braque moved away from the harsh lines and sharp pointed complexity of the cubist style, and instead began to paint pieces with bright colors and eventually return to the human figure.

Theiere et Fruits exhibits that although he departed from his harsh lines and forms, Braque never abandoned his cubist style. He held true to his fragmented forms and simultaneous perspective. By the time of his death in 1963, he was regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the School of Fines art in Paris, as well as in modern art.

Although Braque began his career painting landscapes, during 1908 he discovered the advantages of painting still life pieces. 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 like Theiere et Fruits 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.

Georges Braque, Theiere et Fruits

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