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Lot Essay
A master of the still-life as few in the twentieth century could claim, Georges Braque saw himself as the heir of Chardin and Cézanne and ennobled the most mundane objects through a clear and implacably strict inner logic, the underpinnings of which were based on pictorial solutions he and Picasso had proposed when they created Cubism some twenty five years before Nature morte au pichet. Braque wholly disregarded the prevailing tendencies toward Surrealism, Expressionism, and the return to Realism and unlike Picasso--whose temperment and inventiveness enabled him to use or dispense with the components of any style imaginable with great abandon--Braque set about exclusively applying the contructs of Cubism, which was for him a limitless language, a fundamental rhetoric which could never be exhausted.
In Nature morte au pichet, Braque integrated disparate aspects of Cubism, notably the quasi-naturalistic sense of space and light found in Analytic Cubism and the muted color harmonies and planar qualities of Synthetic Cubism, thus producing a set of complex processes by which contrasts of texture could be rendered--a series of decisions John Russell has called Braque's "distributed sensuality . . . the sensuality marks on the canvas [combined] with the sensuality of the thing remembered". Abandoning voluptuous paint application and decorative nuancing, Braque's works of 1932 were an attempt to prove that "It isn't enough to make visible what you paint. You have to render it touchable" (J. Russell, G. Braque, London, 1959, p. 24).
The paradoxically austere yet sumptuous Nature morte au pichet is comprised of a simple arrangement of elements atop a Cézannesque table cloth: two apples, an orange and a lemon reside near a pitcher, surrounded by a compote and, in the lower right, a somewhat sinister knife casting a shadow upon the table. Color is used sparingly: blue and traces of orange and yellow swirl within an armature of browns and greens. The interaction of objects is decorative but never slack and the objects pulsate quietly with a dignified sobriety.
Throughout Braque's career, the act of painting, for him, became the subject matter of painting. In 1924, Braque commented, "For me Cubism, or rather my Cubism, is a means I created for my own use, that aimed above all to put painting within my range of gifts. Beyond this reason, Cubism did not really interest me: what I love more than anything is painting" (quoted in B. Zurcher, Georges Braque, Life and Work, Fribourg, 1988, p. 281).
In Nature morte au pichet, Braque integrated disparate aspects of Cubism, notably the quasi-naturalistic sense of space and light found in Analytic Cubism and the muted color harmonies and planar qualities of Synthetic Cubism, thus producing a set of complex processes by which contrasts of texture could be rendered--a series of decisions John Russell has called Braque's "distributed sensuality . . . the sensuality marks on the canvas [combined] with the sensuality of the thing remembered". Abandoning voluptuous paint application and decorative nuancing, Braque's works of 1932 were an attempt to prove that "It isn't enough to make visible what you paint. You have to render it touchable" (J. Russell, G. Braque, London, 1959, p. 24).
The paradoxically austere yet sumptuous Nature morte au pichet is comprised of a simple arrangement of elements atop a Cézannesque table cloth: two apples, an orange and a lemon reside near a pitcher, surrounded by a compote and, in the lower right, a somewhat sinister knife casting a shadow upon the table. Color is used sparingly: blue and traces of orange and yellow swirl within an armature of browns and greens. The interaction of objects is decorative but never slack and the objects pulsate quietly with a dignified sobriety.
Throughout Braque's career, the act of painting, for him, became the subject matter of painting. In 1924, Braque commented, "For me Cubism, or rather my Cubism, is a means I created for my own use, that aimed above all to put painting within my range of gifts. Beyond this reason, Cubism did not really interest me: what I love more than anything is painting" (quoted in B. Zurcher, Georges Braque, Life and Work, Fribourg, 1988, p. 281).