House Behind Trees
Georges Braque
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1906-7. OIL ON CANVAS.
Under the strong light of Southern France, Georges Braque started a brief and important affair with Fauvism. He joined the movement late and left early, the whole relationship lasting less than a year and few works resulting from it. Within a year of this work, together with Picasso, Braque would lay the foundations of Cubism, bring sharp geometry and simultaneous perspective to a more subdued colour palette, but it was his time in southern France as temporary Fauvist that allowed this revolution to happen. Braque painted most of his Fauvist works in the fishing villages of La Ciotat and l’Estaque, favourites of Paul Cézanne. Under the shadow of Cézanne’s legacy, Braque drew the ordinary ahead of him and imbued it with magic. Cubism was, for Braque, purely an extension of the ideas Cézanne had started a half-century before, and Braque’s affair with Fauvism was, more than anything, an affair with the spirit of Cézanne who guided him to stranger, more powerful things.