His most famous painting (violin and candlestick) – Georges Braque

Georges Braque was an eminent 20th century French painter and sculptor who was also a co-founder of ‘Cubism’. Born on May 13, 1882 in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, from 1897 to 1899, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, the city where he grew up. He began his artistic journey, experimenting with styles such as ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Fauvism’, before developing ‘Cubism’ together with Pablo Picasso in 1908. Cezanne’s art of ‘multiple perspectives’, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne , in 1907 , inspired the duo towards ‘cubism’. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a painting by Braque in 1908 and called it “cubism” or “strange cubiques”. He perceived the artwork as “full of little cubes”. This led to the christening of Picasso and Georges’s invention as ‘Cubism’, which at first did not excite the duo. Braque’s magnum opus “Violin and Candlestick”, painted in the spring of 1910, exemplifies the vibrant personality of the ‘Cubist’ style of painting.

Mostly monochrome in style and with a ‘Still Life’ theme, Braque’s ‘Cubist’ works mostly amazed the art community. This 24″ x 19 3/4″ (61 cm x 50 cm) oil on canvas, “Violin and Candlestick”, is the result of the amalgamation of musical fragments and violin scores rearranged at unusual angles to create a single image intertwined, with the surface movement of shapes, planes, arcs and colors. The painting, while illustrating a three-dimensional view of the subjects on a flat canvas, eschews traditional ‘Renaissance’ perspective. This is actually ‘cubism’, which focuses on depicting subjects, seen from various angles.

“Violin and Candlestick” was the result of Georges’s obsession with form and stability, fueled by the desire to create an illusion in the mind of the viewer to move freely within the painting. To achieve this, the painter conglomerated the subjects in the center of a grid like armor and covered the boundaries of the outlined objects in black using earth tone colors. In this way, he managed to transform the static volumes to maintain composite surfaces in a flat plane, which allowed viewers to appreciate more the form compared to any other angle. Cunningly recognizing and understanding the effects of light in eliciting the emotions and appropriate effects of subjects also served as a vital parameter for Braque’s “Violin and Candlestick.” He expressed this art of fragmentation as “a technique to get closer to the object”.

Georges Braque expired on August 31, 1963 in Paris. His masterpiece “Violin and Candlestick” is exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.