Cubism: Metropolitan Museum of Art Leonard A. Lauder Tate Modern

Cubism
Georges Braque, late 1909, Still Life with Metronome (Still Life with Mandola and Metronome), oil on
canvas, 81 x 54.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection
Georges Braque, 1909–10, La guitare (Mandora, La Mandore), oil on canvas, 71.1 x 55.9 cm, Tate
Modern, London
Georges Braque, 1910, Violin and Candlestick, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective.
He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that
painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In
his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric
form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional
by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque.
Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a
similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne,
African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested mainly in developing Cézanne's ideas
of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that
the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of
Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.”[3] Braque's essential subject is
the ordinary objects he has known practically forever. Picasso celebrates animation, while Braque
celebrates contemplation.[4] Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and
Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the style's main innovators. After
meeting in October or November 1907,[5] Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the
development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex
patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism.
A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911,[6] when Georges Braque and
Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that
are difficult—sometimes virtually impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they
began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique.[7]
On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's
exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing
everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes". [8]
Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" (cubic oddities) after seeing a
painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.[9]
The term 'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des
Indépendants, quickly gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. 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." [10] The Cubist style
spread quickly throughout Paris and then Europe.
The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the
beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque
received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness.[11] He was
trepanned, and required a long period of recuperation.
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.
— Georges Braque [12][13]

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Cubism

— Georges Braque [12][13]

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