Georges Braque

Sam Jaffé, Beverly Hills

Cahiers d'Art, 1928, no. 10, illustrated p. 362
George Isarlov, Catalogue des œuvres de Georges Braque, Paris, 1932, no. 502
Galerie Maeght (ed.), Catalogue de l'œuvre de Georges Braque, Peintures 1928-1935, Paris, 1962, illustrated p. 30 
Pierre Descargues & Massimo Carrà, Tout l'œuvre peint de Braque, 1908-1929, Paris, 1973, no. 411, illustrated p. 103

The canvas is not lined. There are mottled areas of fluoresence visible under UV light, entirely stable, but possibly reaction to a previously damp atmosphere. There are areas of stable paint shrinkage to the lower left corner, lower right edge and upper right quadrant (visible in the catalogue illustration). This work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the illustration but deeper and richer in the original.
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COMP: 437D07008_COMP
Braque in his studio,1944-54.

Throughout the 1920s Braque continued to experiment with the pictoral language of Cubism, focusing primarily on the still life. The works of this period are characterised by a more restrained approach to Cubist forms, in line with the revival of interest in Neo-Classicism and what Jean Cocteau refered to as le rappel à l'ordre across French society. Many of the works are smaller in size and black becomes a dominant element of the artist's palette, as in this work. The return to order in terms of Braque's work resulted in a focus on the French tradition of still-life painting, with Poussin, Corot and Chardin providing his sources of inspiration, resulting in more naturalistic and accessible works. However, the rendering of a tactile sense of space is still Braque's pre-eminent artist concern, even in these later works: 'There is in nature a tactile space, I might almost say a manual space... This is the the space that fascinates me so much, because that is what early Cubist painting was, a research into space' (Braque quoted in John Golding, Braque, Still Lifes and Interiors, London, 1990, p. 9).