GEORGES BRAQUE | Nature morte à la pipe (Nappe rayée)

Private Collection, Berlin
Mrs. Alexandra Whitney, New York
Mr. Harry P. Whitney, New York
Paul Rosenberg & Company, New York
William Zierler, Inc., New York
Acquired from the above in 1972

Galerie Maeght, ed., Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Georges Braque, peintures 1928-1935, Paris, 1962, illustrated p. 87

The work is in excellent condition. The canvas is not lined. There is an area of pindot loss in the center of bottom edge. There are minor frame abrasions around the extreme perimeter of the canvas and some minor losses due to frame abrasion, most notable at the extreme corners. The pigments are bright and fresh. Under UV light, there is no apparent inpainting.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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For Braque, the still-life genre became a lifelong investigation into the conditions of perception through the study of tangible and transitory everyday objects. More than any other subject matter, Braque returned to the still life consistently throughout his career. Starting with his Fauve period and concluding with his late series of interiors, Braque demonstrated a clear fascination with the challenges and possibilities presented by such compositions. The arrangement of a limited number of objects on a surface afforded him the most suitable subject for investigating both the physical and the formal potentials of painting, and Braque viewed himself as continuing the progressive understanding of the still life begun by Paul Cézanne.  Between 1920 and 1928, Braque aligned himself with the rappel à l'ordre, the French cultural movement reacting to the chaos of World War I, and its emphasis on classicism in art. His still lifes from the period are characterized by a greater emphasis on naturalistic representation and a subdued color palette. In 1928, however, Braque made significant changes to his approach to the genre: “Braque abandons naturalistic depiction and the sensitive painterly element so as to make visible the picture’s structure, its framework, which is now no longer restricted to the narrowly delimited pictorial plane but reaches far into space. In addition, his palette, which for the last ten years has been dominated by dark tones of green, grey and black, is relieved by light colors” (Jean Leymarie, Georges Braque (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1988, p. 27).

Dating from 1932, Nature morte à la pipe (Nappe rayée) masterfully encapsulates this shift in Braque’s approach to still-life painting. Here, he draws from disparate elements of Cubism, notably the planar properties of Synthetic Cubism and the spatial considerations of Analytic Cubism. Of the concept of space represented two-dimensionally, Braque commented: "There is in nature a tactile space; I might almost say a manual space... This is the space that fascinates me so much, because that is what early Cubist painting was, a research into space" (quoted in John Golding, Braque, Still Lifes and Interiors, London, 1990, p. 9). Unlike his subdued, tonal still-life images from the 1920s, the present work is marked by bold and tactile flashes of color, further emphasized by choice placement against a monochromatic background.