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Lot Essay
After the Occupation of Paris in May of 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.
Le guridon rouge represents a departure from other works of this period; Braque has replaced the usually meager contents and somber palette with a glass of wine (not easy to find during the war years) and a banjo and sheet music (frequently seen in works throughout his oeuvre, beginning with the Cubism years), not to mention purely explosive color harmonies. The richly orchestrated composition of varying patterns and interlocking planes and the fusion of objects and surrounding space. Devices relating back to Cubism are evident everywhere, from the shallow compressed space, the up-tilting planes, such as the table top which parallels the picture plane, and elusive contours. The entire composition pulsates. As 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 quite for other reasons. . .As they give up their habitual function, so objects acquire a human harmony. Then they become united by 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).
Many of the attributes of the present painting hark back to the Guridon series Braque painted in the late 1920s. There are notable differences between the two series, considering the more than twenty years which seperates them, but not drastic. The heavy corolla of Le guridon, 1928 (fig. 1), supported by a three-legged stand has now matured into a seemingly serrated doric column in the present work, the forms of which are echoed in the stylized leaves in the wallpaper. The wooden paneling and wallpaper, too, first appear in the still-lifes of the 1920s (fig. 2), however they are now more agitated and abstracted in the Russell Braque.
A master of still life as few in the twentieth century could claim, Georges Braque saw himself as the heir of Chardin and Czanne and ennobled the most mundane objects through a clear and implaccably strict inner logic, the underpinnings of which were based on pictorial solutions he and Picasso had proposed when they created Cubism some forty years before the Russell collection's Le guridon rouge.
(fig. 1) Georges Braque, Le guridon, 1928.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
(fig. 2) Georges Braque, Le guridon rouge, 1939-1952.
Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Le guridon rouge represents a departure from other works of this period; Braque has replaced the usually meager contents and somber palette with a glass of wine (not easy to find during the war years) and a banjo and sheet music (frequently seen in works throughout his oeuvre, beginning with the Cubism years), not to mention purely explosive color harmonies. The richly orchestrated composition of varying patterns and interlocking planes and the fusion of objects and surrounding space. Devices relating back to Cubism are evident everywhere, from the shallow compressed space, the up-tilting planes, such as the table top which parallels the picture plane, and elusive contours. The entire composition pulsates. As 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 quite for other reasons. . .As they give up their habitual function, so objects acquire a human harmony. Then they become united by 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).
Many of the attributes of the present painting hark back to the Guridon series Braque painted in the late 1920s. There are notable differences between the two series, considering the more than twenty years which seperates them, but not drastic. The heavy corolla of Le guridon, 1928 (fig. 1), supported by a three-legged stand has now matured into a seemingly serrated doric column in the present work, the forms of which are echoed in the stylized leaves in the wallpaper. The wooden paneling and wallpaper, too, first appear in the still-lifes of the 1920s (fig. 2), however they are now more agitated and abstracted in the Russell Braque.
A master of still life as few in the twentieth century could claim, Georges Braque saw himself as the heir of Chardin and Czanne and ennobled the most mundane objects through a clear and implaccably strict inner logic, the underpinnings of which were based on pictorial solutions he and Picasso had proposed when they created Cubism some forty years before the Russell collection's Le guridon rouge.
(fig. 1) Georges Braque, Le guridon, 1928.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
(fig. 2) Georges Braque, Le guridon rouge, 1939-1952.
Muse National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.