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georges braque 1882-1963
Verre et pipe, JOUR
Signed on the reverse
Oil on oval canvas
10 5/8 by 16 1/4 in. 27 by 41.3 cm.
Painted circa 1913.
Provenance: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paris (sold: Hotel Drouot, Paris, 2e vente Kahnweiler, November 17-18, 1921, lot 17); Raoul La Roche, Paris (probably acquired at the above sale and until at least circa 1950); Mr. and Mrs. Bossard, Paris (by 1970); Sale: Sotheby's, London, December 2, 1986, lot 60; Acquired at the above sale
Exhibited: St. Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght; Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne, A la Rencontre de Pierre Reverdy, 1970, no. 292; Vienna, Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Kunstverein, Die Sprache der Kunst, 1993, no. 4
Literature: Georges Isarlov, Catalogue des oeuvres de Georges Braque, Paris, 1932, no. 185, listed p. 19; Nicole Worms de Romilly and Jean Laude, Braque, Cubisme, 1907-1914, Paris, 1982, no. 219, catalogued pp. 286-87, illustrated p. 231
With its highly balanced composition, densely painted surface and muted palette of browns, grays and whites, Verre et pipe, JOUR has all the poise and visual complexity of Braque's most successful Cubist paintings. This quintessential Cubist still-life is one of a series of works Braque executed on an oval-shaped canvas in 1913 (previously dated 1914 by Isarlov and Romilly). This format,
suggestive of a table-top, enabled the artist to view the canvas's surface as an object itself, and a plane on which to deconstruct the composition. Braque began using oval canvases in 1910 (see fig. 2), and his preference for this format increased over the years. The artist, fascinated by the compact pictorial surface and the greater concentration of subject matter allowed by the elision of corners, commented: "With oval formats I regained the sense of the horizontal and the vertical."
In this painting the artist directly employed the 'table-top' canvas as the
picture plane and abstracted the compositional elements that rest on its surface. Line plays an important role in describing the spatial relationships of the objects depicted, whilst at the same time defining the structural outline of the composition. "Braque, rather more than Picasso, concentrated on elaborating the structural notation within each picture, on synthesizing and suggesting the forms of objects rather than showing their different aspects, and on representing the relationships between objects (or between different parts of the body) and the space around them. Space was thus 'materialized' instead of being invoked by illusion. Light was directed at will to give relief where needed, and the principle of a single viewpoint was wholly abandoned." (Douglas Cooper, The Essential Cubism, London, 1983, p. 72).
Karen Wilkin, commenting on Braque's 1913-14 horizontal oval paintings, noted: "Like some of the best and best known of the pasted papers, they are horizontal pictures, oval or with inscribed ovals and virtually empty corners. Unlike vertical ovals, which carry a lingering memory of 18th century trophy pictures that confront the viewer with a display of their contents, these horizontal pictures seem relaxed, almost effortless. Line drifts across unbroken planes, crossing boundaries, defining and unifying. Well-known objects surface fleetingly, indicated by shorthand signs that we read largely because of our experience of other such signs, in other pictures. Fragments of trompe-l'oeil molding, a relic both of Braque's past and of the papiers colles, form a stabilizing vertical and horizontal axis, cardinal points against which everything fans out in a casual scattering of luminous planes. Braque turns the commonplace, by now predictable iconography of the Cubist studio into some of the most elegant, intelligent painting of the twentieth century." (Karen Wilkin, Braque, New York, 1991, pp. 36-37).
In Verre et pipe, JOUR Braque sought to bring the clarity and simplification that he had achieved in his papiers colles during 1912-13 to his cubist compositions painted with oil on canvas (see fig. 1). The principal still-life elements in the present work are a glass, with its top rim occupying the approximate center of the oblong composition, a newspaper - indicated by the letters JOUR painted at an angle at the left - and a pipe: the stem is situated behind the glass at the left while the bowl continues behind the base of the glass at the lower right. This arrangement suggests that we are looking from above onto a tabletop, which takes on the actual oval shape of the canvas. Areas of wood-graining which Braque created by combing through brown paint in several areas on the left-hand side of the composition create the effect of wood. The white areas suggest that the table is partially covered by a cloth.
Braque's method was careful and meticulous, especially in his attention to matiere, that is, his materials. He mixed his own pigments and sometimes used decorators' implements, such as the comb to create the effect of woodgraining, to heighten the contrast of his traditional brushwork with commercial techniques. In this work he divided the space of the oval into roughly two halves, with a vertical edge (rather than a line) running from top to bottom in the center, broken only by a portion of the glass. One can imagine that Braque proceeded by drawing a central, horizontal plane (the cream-colored area) with other planes radiating out around it. The effects of woodgraining and the abbreviated brushstrokes create additional planes. The edges of these planes are enhanced through additional brushstrokes that create the effect of shadows or three-dimensionality because of the actual thickness of the paint.
In this still-life Braque uses the fragmentation of the newspaper title, with simulated newsprint lettering, and the transparency of the glass to situate objects one in front of another. Planes are treated in a similar way. Rather than receding into space, the various elements come forward, within our reach. Braque later expressed the view that one of the great achievements of Cubism was the establishment of a new way of expressing spatial relationships: "...the whole Renaissance tradition is antipathetic to me. The hard and fast rules of perspective which it imposed on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress: Cezanne and, after him, Picasso and myself can take a lot of the credit for this. Scientific perspective is nothing but eye-fooling illusionism; it is simply a trick - a bad trick - which makes it impossible for an artist to convey a full experience of space, since it forces the objects in a picture to disappear from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach, as painting should." (statement made to John Richardson, reprinted in Georges Braque: An American Tribute, New York, 1964).
The present work can be related to several other compositions done in 1913, including the Pedestal Table, Le Petit Provencal (Romilly no. 184), Still-life with a pipe (Romilly no. 236), and the rectangular Bottle of Eau-de-Vie (Romilly no. 235), of early 1914.