He used black with moderation to add washed-out shadows” ( op.cit., exh. Isabelle Monod-Fontaine explains that in 1909 “Picasso and Braque both moved toward a reduction of color. Suffused with an even light, L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis shows Braque's interest in form, but reveals his deft ability with color. It marks the final culmination of his development, of his growth and of his maturity as an artist. Thus L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis is an exceptionally rare work in showcasing the state of Braque's avant-garde vision just before its incredible transformation with Cubism. He would only rarely, and decades later, return to the landscape after this. Only a short time after this work was painted, Braque would forsake the landscapes in which he had made so much progress and would focus instead on still life and portraits. L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis depicts a scene near Chatou and marks the culmination of Braque's transitional, proto-Cubist period. By extension, this same process of development also filled and fuelled Braque's landscapes in other parts of France. This evolution is visible in the comparison between the Fauve landscapes he created there in 1906, the transitional ones, for instance Viaduc à L'Estaque from early 1908 (Centre Georges Pompidou), and then finally the 1910 picture of Les usines de Rio-Tinto à L'Estaque (Centre Georges Pompidou). The steady development of Braque's art can be seen in some of his L'Estaque paintings, which begin as Fauve images with an increased sense of structure and end as multi-faceted, crystalline forms that perfectly harness the interplay between buildings, trees and landscape. Even after his initial viewing of ten Cézanne pictures exhibited in 1906, Braque had taken off for L'Estaque, a landscape which had rich associations with Cézanne, who had immortalized it in his works. It was in his landscapes that Cézanne had explored these issues, and this was the format that Braque also took. The influence of Gauguin and Van Gogh which had been felt throughout the Fauves and the Expressionists was supplanted by the dramatic, and more profound, questions that were raised by Cézanne's painting, a visual language that conveyed a sense of volume and of three-dimensionality despite the two-dimensional nature of the medium. Thus in 1907, many of the young and avant-garde artists of the day, who had been only vaguely aware of Cézanne's works, had epiphanies when confronted with his explorations of form in oils and on paper. The year after the Master of Aix had died, a large posthumous retrospective had been organized. L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis reveals the speed with which Braque had capitalized on the lessons he learned from Cézanne's paintings. It is an enduring irony that his slightly condescending words would end up coining the word “Cubism”. Mullins, The Art of Georges Braque, New York, 1968, p. He despises form and reduces everything, landscapes and figures and houses, to geometrical patterns, to cubes” (Vauxcelles, quoted in E. The importance of the early landscapes, such as the present work, is reflected in the fact that the year before this picture was painted, the critic Louis Vauxcelles had discussed similar Braque landscapes, “M. Despite having been an accomplished Fauve artist, he went through a second formative period, and it was in his landscapes that he made the greatest progress. 43).īraque's most important artistic developments took place in the years leading up to the painting of L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard Lauder Collection, exh. Pepe Karmel has related about the period from 1909-1910, “the dialogue between Picasso and Braque seems to have been most intense” (E. Now, he had advanced on Cézanne in rendering form in two dimensions, and he needed only his return to his studio in Paris and his collaboration with Picasso for full-blown Cubism to be born. It is in the late landscapes of Braque's transitional period that the bare bones of the movement truly consolidated. Painted in 1909, L'église de Carrières-Saint-Denis dates from the early moments of Cubism.
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