Little Harbor in Normandy
Georges Braque
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1909. OIL ON CANVAS.
Georges Braque began his career painting landscapes. Inspired by the work of Cézanne, he sought to push the great artist’s philosophy of multiple perspectives to its logical conclusion, and he took up much the same subject matter as his inspiration. That changed, however, after a meeting with Pablo Picasso in 1908, and a discovery that the two artists were approaching the same ideas, philosophies and hopes from radically different origins. Together, they created one of the most significant movements in the history of art - Cubism, and Braque’s landscapes began to be replaced by still life. “In the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space.”, said Braque, “In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other”. Still-life became the subject matter of Cubism and yet the piece here, painted in 1909, and widely regarded as the first fully completed Cubist artwork, shows the artist unable to fully give up his beginnings. The sea and small boats are frenetic with energy, they dance across the canvas and hurtle towards the viewer at full speed. Braque found, early on, a way to make the landscape shrink entirely the distance between the viewer and the piece.