Georges Braque - Cubism at Picasso’s Side
10. December 2008, 12:47:08 unter: Art Spaces, Austria, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Exhibitions, German, Podcasts, Video, ViennaIt began, as it had to begin, how painting – which captures something new, thereby disturbing the conventional view – nearly always begins. With the changing times. With the meeting of artistic minds. With admiration that follows, along with a lack of understanding and sometimes even denial.
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Four years after Georges Braque moved into the French capital from Normandy, he was still painting landscapes in the Impressionistic style. However, his sphere of influence changed. He admires Matisse, Derain, Dufy, and Friesz. Not two years passed by before he became one of the Fauves, one of the young wild ones, as the art critic Louis Vauxcelles patronizingly referred to them on the occasion of an exhibition. Braque commuted between the city, the Montmartre district of Paris, where Picasso had also set up his studio, and the country, the southern Mediterranean coast. There, in Provence, Braque developed his first Fauvist landscapes of pure color. Beginning in 1908, as he was traveling once again to the south to L’Estaque, flat, geometric surfaces became prominent in his paintings. Braque wanted to exhibit these harbingers of Cubism in the Salon d’Automne issue, but they were rejected by the jury.
Picasso reffered to Braque with the statement, “C’est ma femme”, a reflection of their intensive artistic collaboration which began in the following years. Through mutual inspiration and stimulus, the two artists visually experimented with the fragmentation of subject matter: breaking through the central perspective in favor of the multiplication of foci; concentrating on the reality of the picture rather than reality of the subject, thereby approaching the borders of abstraction; the dissolution of figure and foundation; experimenting with the objective character of the picture – its structure, materiality, and autonomy – introducing foreign materials and fragments into the reality of the picture. The most innovative developments of the still recent century rose from this collaboration. They are the art-historical starting points of further developments in modern art. At the beginning of the Second World War, the mutual support system of artists, as Braque liked to refer to this era, came to an end.
When he returned from the war, Braque took up where he had left off – Cubism. He dedicated himself to the still life. For him, painting was meant to stir things up, which meant avoiding total abstraction. Studio pictures followed, an introverted subject for an equally introverted personality, so Braque returned to the landscape in the last years of his life.
Despite intensive collaboration and Braque’s innovative spirit, Picasso was always the center of attention, the cult of personality accounts for the more extroverted one of the two artists. However, this imbalance is not justified on the artistic level, according to Heike Eipeldauer and Caroline Messensee, the curators of the latest Braque retrospective at the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna. With works on loan from over fifty institutions, the Bank Austria Kunstforum is exhibiting the impressive oeuvre of the French painter for the first time in twenty years in Austria. The work of the painter will be on display until March 1st, 2009 at the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna. (wh)
