Lot Essay
After the fall of Paris in May 1940, Braque took temporary refuge first in the south of France and then in the Pyrenees. By October, however, he had returned to his house in Paris, where he remained throughout the rest of the war. The majority of the paintings which Braque made during the Occupation are still-lifes: simple table-top arrangements of everyday objects which form a marked contrast to the sumptuous displays he depicted before the war. Although the meager contents and somber palette of these pictures reflect the austerity of the artist's lifestyle during the war years, their richly varied textures and elegant spatial relationships speak to his persistent creativity.
The 1940's still-lifes represent an important stage in Braque's lifelong exploration of the problem of depicting objects in space. With their flattened imagery and muted tones, works like Le moulin à café clearly grow out of Braque's experiments with Cubism between 1907 and 1914; and they provide the genesis for the masterly Atelier series which he was to undertake in 1949. Braque himself commented upon his quest to rework concepts of space and form:
Without having striven for it, I do in fact end by changing the meaning of objects and giving them a pictorial significance which is adequate to their new life. When I paint a vase, it is not with the intention of painting a utensil capable of holding water. It is for quite other reasons. Objects are recreated for a new purpose: in this case, that of playing a part in a picture.... Once an object has been integrated into a picture, it accepts a new density and at the same time becomes universal. If it remains an individual object this must be due to lack of improvisation or imagination. As they give up their habitual function, so objects acquire a human harmony. Then they become united by the relationships which sprung up between them, and more important between them and the picture and ultimately myself. (quoted in D. Cooper, Braque, The Great Years, Chicago, 1972, p. 111)
The still-lifes which Braque painted during the war frequently feature a fish or a crustacean on a platter, positioned in opposition to a vase, a teapot, or another object, such as the coffee mill in the present work. Louis Aragon has suggested that Braque intended the fish to be a symbol of the French Resistance, while the poet Pierre Reverdy viewed the black fish as an image drawn from the unconscious:
It happens that these fish are black, inedible. You are already bristling with repugnance, with fury, perhaps, because they are black and you cannot find fish that are such a beautiful black in nature, unlike the way it is in man's privileged space.... These black fish are for me a powerful and moving image that I could never have invented or enlightened humanity with, and the connections that I had never been able to see which, in the canvas where I found them caught together with the dish, the table, the paneling on the wall and the apples, make a new living body, created by an act of will so free, solid and masterly that it takes over my senses and delights my spirit! Black fish that had yet to be sent to the unfathomable depths where so many of my dreams lie. Black fish brought together with apples, outside the vicissitudes of time in an infinite dimension. (quoted in B. Zurcher, Georges Braque, Life and Work, New York, 1988, p. 174)
The 1940's still-lifes represent an important stage in Braque's lifelong exploration of the problem of depicting objects in space. With their flattened imagery and muted tones, works like Le moulin à café clearly grow out of Braque's experiments with Cubism between 1907 and 1914; and they provide the genesis for the masterly Atelier series which he was to undertake in 1949. Braque himself commented upon his quest to rework concepts of space and form:
Without having striven for it, I do in fact end by changing the meaning of objects and giving them a pictorial significance which is adequate to their new life. When I paint a vase, it is not with the intention of painting a utensil capable of holding water. It is for quite other reasons. Objects are recreated for a new purpose: in this case, that of playing a part in a picture.... Once an object has been integrated into a picture, it accepts a new density and at the same time becomes universal. If it remains an individual object this must be due to lack of improvisation or imagination. As they give up their habitual function, so objects acquire a human harmony. Then they become united by the relationships which sprung up between them, and more important between them and the picture and ultimately myself. (quoted in D. Cooper, Braque, The Great Years, Chicago, 1972, p. 111)
The still-lifes which Braque painted during the war frequently feature a fish or a crustacean on a platter, positioned in opposition to a vase, a teapot, or another object, such as the coffee mill in the present work. Louis Aragon has suggested that Braque intended the fish to be a symbol of the French Resistance, while the poet Pierre Reverdy viewed the black fish as an image drawn from the unconscious:
It happens that these fish are black, inedible. You are already bristling with repugnance, with fury, perhaps, because they are black and you cannot find fish that are such a beautiful black in nature, unlike the way it is in man's privileged space.... These black fish are for me a powerful and moving image that I could never have invented or enlightened humanity with, and the connections that I had never been able to see which, in the canvas where I found them caught together with the dish, the table, the paneling on the wall and the apples, make a new living body, created by an act of will so free, solid and masterly that it takes over my senses and delights my spirit! Black fish that had yet to be sent to the unfathomable depths where so many of my dreams lie. Black fish brought together with apples, outside the vicissitudes of time in an infinite dimension. (quoted in B. Zurcher, Georges Braque, Life and Work, New York, 1988, p. 174)