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Lot Essay
The present work is being restituted to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim and is offered for sale pursuant to a settlement agreement between them and the consignor. This resolves any dispute over ownership of the work and title will pass to the buyer.
Braque was drawn towards the dramatic, chalky cliffs of the region's coastline that he had first encountered as a boy. From the late 1920s onwards he spent a part of every year at a house he had built for himself on the coast at Varengeville, and it became his valued retreat away from the pressures of life in Paris. It was while staying here that he began his series of small-scale beach landscapes, of which the present lot is a prime example. Falaise et bateau échoué is a work which brilliantly combines Braque’s incomparable feeling for modernist composition with the French landscape painting tradition. Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet had found inspiration in the quiet harbors and on the luminous beaches of the north-west coast of France, and now “the moist silvery light of the Normandy coasts, its cliffs, broad beaches and clear horizons…began to exert their appeal on Braque” (E. Mullins, Braque, 1968, p. 121). In the present work, Braque arranges the elements of a seaside landscape with characteristic deftness, displaying his remarkable sense of how plane, form and color interact.
Landscape had been crucial in Braque's formulation of cubism in the years preceding 1910. However it was to disappear from his repertoire until these beach pictures of almost twenty years later. The quietly lyrical pattern and simple, planar construction of Falaise et bateau échoué, whilst indebted to the rigours of Braque's cubist still-lifes, also recall his work as a ballet designer for Sergei Diaghilev.
Braque was drawn towards the dramatic, chalky cliffs of the region's coastline that he had first encountered as a boy. From the late 1920s onwards he spent a part of every year at a house he had built for himself on the coast at Varengeville, and it became his valued retreat away from the pressures of life in Paris. It was while staying here that he began his series of small-scale beach landscapes, of which the present lot is a prime example. Falaise et bateau échoué is a work which brilliantly combines Braque’s incomparable feeling for modernist composition with the French landscape painting tradition. Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet had found inspiration in the quiet harbors and on the luminous beaches of the north-west coast of France, and now “the moist silvery light of the Normandy coasts, its cliffs, broad beaches and clear horizons…began to exert their appeal on Braque” (E. Mullins, Braque, 1968, p. 121). In the present work, Braque arranges the elements of a seaside landscape with characteristic deftness, displaying his remarkable sense of how plane, form and color interact.
Landscape had been crucial in Braque's formulation of cubism in the years preceding 1910. However it was to disappear from his repertoire until these beach pictures of almost twenty years later. The quietly lyrical pattern and simple, planar construction of Falaise et bateau échoué, whilst indebted to the rigours of Braque's cubist still-lifes, also recall his work as a ballet designer for Sergei Diaghilev.