Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life

Munich

One of the leading founders of Cubism, Georges Braque employed the genre of the still life to conduct a lifelong investigation into the nature of perception. In an interview late in his career, he explained that his goal as an artist had long been to render the space between humans and the objects that make up everyday life. As such, it was the still life, with its focus on objects within reach of the hand, that best allowed him to address this relationship.

Prestel’s latest publication, Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928-1945 provides new insight into the critical reception of the artist’s modernist work. It moves chronologically, examining paintings produced from 1928 – roughly when Braque’s work emerged from the neoclassicism of the retour à l’ordre (return to order) – to 1945, with the end of World War II. By focussing on less than two decades of the artist’s work and on the genre of the still life (though Braque did produce landscapes and figures during this period), the book offers an unprecedented investigation of the cyclic nature of Braque’s process and materials, while examining the interplay of the external and internal world of history and art.

Prestel