Kemper Art Museum presents Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945, an exhibition on view January 25, 2013 – April 21, 2013.
Georges Braque, Mandolin and Score (The Banjo), 1941. Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 35″. Collection of Charles and Palmer Ducommun. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 offers the first detailed examination of Braque’s experiments with still lifes and interiors during the years leading up to and through World War II, an overlooked and transitional period in the career of this leading founder of Cubism. Braque employed the genre of the still life to conduct a lifelong investigation into the nature of perception through the tactile and transitory world of everyday objects.
Attending to the cyclical nature of the artist’s work, the project examines the
transformations in Braque’s creative process as he moved from painting small, intimate interiors in the late 1920s, to depicting bold, large-scale, tactile Cubist spaces in the 1930s, to creating personal renderings of daily life in the 1940s. In order to understand Braque’s artistic process, conservators performed technical analysis on a selection of paintings to investigate how he manipulated art materials for compositional effect and returned to canvases to alter and rework the paint surface. Braque’s methods and techniques —his pigments and materials—during this moment are all examined for the very first time.
The exhibition also considers his work in relation to contemporary aesthetic debates about politically engaged culture. In a war-torn era that saw the emergence of philosophies that questioned the very nature of human existence and experience, such as existentialism and phenomenology, Braque’s uninterrupted devotion to the Cubist still life may appear at odds with the historical and political circumstances of the time. But if his attention to the private, secluded world of still lifes suggests a disengagement with political and historical circumstances, the paintings themselves and their contemporary reception convey a more complex narrative—one that has been virtually unexplored by curators and scholars until now. – www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu
