Georges Braque- Violin and Pipe/ Le Quotidien

ARTIST

Georges Braque

Violin and Pipe, 'Le Quotidien'

Date: 1913; France *

Style: Synthetic Cubism

Genre: still life

Medium: chalk, charcoal, collage, paper

Dimensions: 106 x 74 cm

Location: Georges Pompidou Center, Paris, France

Tags: musical-instruments, cigarettes-and-pipes, newspapers

References: (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-braque-georges.htm#important_art_header)

http://www.abcgallery.com/B/braque/braquebio.html

Biography:

French painter, collagist and sculptor Georges Braque is, along with Pablo Picasso, renowned as the co-founder of Cubism, which revolutionized 20th-century painting. In his work, objects are fragmented and reconstructed into geometric forms, fracturing the picture plane in order to explore a variety of viewpoints. “The hard-and-fast rules of perspective … were a ghastly mistake which…has taken four centuries to redress,” he said in 1957. Merging aspects of the sculptural with the pictorial, Braque was also an innovator in the use of collage, inventing a technique known as papier collé, which he first explored in one early work Fruit Dish and Glass (1912) by attaching pieces of wallpaper to a charcoal drawing. This approach deeply influenced not only his contemporaries but generations of artists from Modernism to the present.

(https://www.artsy.net/artist/georges-braque)

Statement:

In art, progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits. Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and gives impulse to creation. Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence. New means, new subjects. The subject is not the object, it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means. The painter thinks in terms of form and color.

The goal is not to be concerned with reconstituting an anecdotal fact, but with constituting a pictorial fact. Painting is a method of representation. One must not imitate what one wants to create. One does not imitate appearances; the appearance is the result. To be pure imitation, painting must forget appearance. To work from nature is to improvise. One must beware of an all-purpose formula that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization…The senses deform, the mind forms. Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.

(https://artiststatements.wordpress.com/tag/georges-braque/) from “Pensées et réflexions sur la peinture,” Nord-Sud 10 (December 1917).
Reprinted in Artists on Art, Pantheon, NY, 1958, pp. 422-423

My Connection:

Braque used various techniques including; fauvism, impressionism, and collage but is know most for being credited as the inventor of cubism along with Picasso.

Violin and pipe is a collage piece, though fragmented, the composition of the layering shapes and tones have a sense of continuity. Though there is some musical quality, I connected more with the name Le Quotidient or “the daily” than any recognizable violin. The everyday shapes and items placed by the artist as for inspiration and then becoming the art itself is a glimpse into the artists process.