BY HOLLY TODD
Dreaming of Paris during the pandemic ? The Bucerius Kunst Forum has come to the rescue and brought Paris to Hamburg in the form of an exhibition conceived by and largely drawn from the Pompidou Centre . Its subject , the modernist French painter Georges Braque , has been overshadowed by his more flamboyant contemporaries , above all Pablo Picasso , with whom he worked closely early in his career . Without a doubt , Picasso was more daring and inventive than Braque over the long term and the content of his art more gripping . During their close collaboration from 1909-1914 , however , which lay the groundwork for Picasso ’ s further development , Braque seems to have been the more openminded and innovative . It is definitely worth taking a closer look at his art , and we can be grateful to the Bucerius for making him the subject of another of its popular small , well-staged retrospectives , the first major show of the artist ’ s paintings in Germany in 30 years .
The son of artisans in Le Havre , Braque originally came to Paris in 1900 to complete an apprenticeship as an interior decorative painter . Braque had studied artistic painting evenings at the Academy of Fine Arts ( École des Beaux -Arts ) in Le Havre , but in Paris he met artists working outside the academy . He painted and exhibited with the Fauve painters who abandoned modeling and one-point perspective in favor of unrestrained strokes and flat swaths of pure color . In 1907 , Braque discovered the work of Paul Cézanne , who had died a year earlier . Under the latter ’ s influence , he began covering the surfaces of his paintings with loose facets of color , giving his pictures a sense of undulating relief without depending on a coherent illusion of volume or space . This is what Braque brought to the table when he met Picasso , who had similarly been striving to give his paintings a stronger physical presence by borrowing the aggressive frontality , extreme geometric simplification of form , and disregard for consistent figure-ground relationships of some African masks and figures . The result was Cubism .
The exhibition traces Braque ’ s Cubist development before World War I from early monochrome “ analytical ” dissection of form into multiple fragmentary views to the “ synthetic ” building up of form with flat-colored or textured planes . After the war , his subject matter becomes more recognizable and decorative and , thereafter , undergoes only slight variations . In the 1930s , under the influence of Surrealism , inanimate objects morph into one another and take on human qualities ; during World War II Braque ’ s pictures become darker and starker . Perhaps reflecting his artisan background , Braque remained a painter ‘ s painter throughout his life , rarely straying from his preferred stilllife subject matter , but within that neutral framework constantly exploring and refining pictorial form . Wandering through an exhibition of paintings by Braque is a great and quiet pleasure for anyone who simply enjoys the sensual possibilities of colored paint applied to a rectangular flat surface . Let ’ s hope that the Bucerius will be allowed to reopen its doors before the loaned pictures have to be returned to Paris .
Georges Braque : Le Guéridon rouge / Das rote Tischchen , 1939 – 1952 , Centre Pompidou , Musée national d ‘ art moderne , Paris . Schenkung Madame Georges Braque , 1965 © VG Bild-Kunst , Bonn 2020 . © Foto : Centre Pompidou ,
MNAM-CCI / Georges Meguerditchian / Dist . RMN-GP
34 In Hamburg
Georges Braque : Les Poissons noirs / Schwarze Fische ( Detail ), 1942 , Collection Centre Pompidou , Musée national d ‘ art moderne , Paris Schenkung des Künstlers , 1947 . © VG Bild-Kunst , Bonn 2020
© Foto : Centre Pompidou , MNAM-CCI / Philippe Migeat / Dist . RMN-GP