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Lot Essay
Having recovered from the head wound he had received during the fighting at Carency during the First World War, Braque resumed painting in 1917, and by the early 1920s he achieved well-deserved success. He sold all eighteen of the major paintings that he exhibited at the 1922 Salon d'Automne. Paul Rosenfeld, who had done much to further Pablo Picasso's fortunes in the years following the First World War, became Braque's dealer as well, and gave the artist a successful show in May 1924. Later that year, Braque moved from Montparnasse to a house which the architect Auguste Perret had designed especially for him, which was situated on the respectable rue de Douanier (today called rue Georges Braque), near the Parc Monsouris. It would remain his home for the rest of his life.
"The mid-1920s were rich in small still-lifes. These cabinet-paintings, which manage to combine so effortlessly the French nature morte tradition with a new pictorial language developed from Cubism, are in some respects the very quintessence of Braque. Small in scale, humble in theme, exuding an unaffected relish for the pleasures of plain bourgeois living they are the purest examples of Braque the craftsman, and of Braque the lover of things simple and everyday. They are also Braque's point of closest contact with that earlier master of intimate still-life, Chardin, and through him the Dutch seventeenth-century still-lifes that were so popular with the French in Chardin's day, and about which the term 'cabinet-pictures' was first used" (E. Mullins, Braque, London, 1968, pp. 108-109).
These still-lifes show Braque's new interest in color, and in this respect the artist was catching up with Picasso and Juan Gris, who had turned to an increasing use of strong color in the synthetic cubist still-lifes they painted during the war years, while Braque was serving at the front and unable to paint. Braque described his new pictorial goal as exploring "how far one can go in blending volume and color" (quoted in J. Leymarie, Georges Braque, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988, p. 27). The present painting shows areas of the black ground that Braque favored using in his still-lifes from 1918 to 1926. While the still-life elements have been rendered as flattened profiles that serve as simple "signs" for the objects they represent (as in Cubist practice), Braque has created spatial depth by contrasting white against black in the plate and pitcher, against which his local, unmodelled colors resonate more richly. The artist often employed elongated horizontal formats during this period, allowing him to disperse the focal points in his still-life compositions, resulting in a sense of casual intimacy and "relaxed suppleness" not previously encountered in his art (P. Descargues, in G. Braque, New York, 1978, p. 137).
"The mid-1920s were rich in small still-lifes. These cabinet-paintings, which manage to combine so effortlessly the French nature morte tradition with a new pictorial language developed from Cubism, are in some respects the very quintessence of Braque. Small in scale, humble in theme, exuding an unaffected relish for the pleasures of plain bourgeois living they are the purest examples of Braque the craftsman, and of Braque the lover of things simple and everyday. They are also Braque's point of closest contact with that earlier master of intimate still-life, Chardin, and through him the Dutch seventeenth-century still-lifes that were so popular with the French in Chardin's day, and about which the term 'cabinet-pictures' was first used" (E. Mullins, Braque, London, 1968, pp. 108-109).
These still-lifes show Braque's new interest in color, and in this respect the artist was catching up with Picasso and Juan Gris, who had turned to an increasing use of strong color in the synthetic cubist still-lifes they painted during the war years, while Braque was serving at the front and unable to paint. Braque described his new pictorial goal as exploring "how far one can go in blending volume and color" (quoted in J. Leymarie, Georges Braque, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988, p. 27). The present painting shows areas of the black ground that Braque favored using in his still-lifes from 1918 to 1926. While the still-life elements have been rendered as flattened profiles that serve as simple "signs" for the objects they represent (as in Cubist practice), Braque has created spatial depth by contrasting white against black in the plate and pitcher, against which his local, unmodelled colors resonate more richly. The artist often employed elongated horizontal formats during this period, allowing him to disperse the focal points in his still-life compositions, resulting in a sense of casual intimacy and "relaxed suppleness" not previously encountered in his art (P. Descargues, in G. Braque, New York, 1978, p. 137).