拍品专文
George Braque's interior scenes and still life paintings of the late 1930s have been regarded as the most complex and beautifully rendered compositions that the artist created since his Cubist period more than two decades earlier. As John Golding remarked, "the still-lifes executed in the second half of the 1930s are among the fullest and most sumptuous in the entire French canon" (in Braque: The Late Works, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997, p. 1).
In 1931, Braque traveled to Florence and Venice, and the impact of this trip is clearly reflected in his works of the early to mid-1930s. Here he began to freely express his aversion to the rigid sense of perspective employed in Renaissance work, instead preferring to explore the breakdown of space and three-dimensional objects when translated onto the canvas. Around 1936, the focus of Braque's paintings began to shift from the still life to wider interior views. Into these ornately decorated rooms he introduced impersonal, flattened figures, as in Femme à la mandoline (fig. 1; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the current work of the same title. In both of these canvases Braque revisited a classical subject--a woman seated with a musical instrument central to the composition--by juxtaposing geometric planes of color and pattern in order to achieve a sense of advancing and receding space. His revived interest in brilliant color, decoration and rhythmical patterning serve as an ornamental background to the strongly curved outlines of the figure and musical elements in particular.
(fig. 1) Georges Braque, Femme à la mandoline, 1937. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 1931, Braque traveled to Florence and Venice, and the impact of this trip is clearly reflected in his works of the early to mid-1930s. Here he began to freely express his aversion to the rigid sense of perspective employed in Renaissance work, instead preferring to explore the breakdown of space and three-dimensional objects when translated onto the canvas. Around 1936, the focus of Braque's paintings began to shift from the still life to wider interior views. Into these ornately decorated rooms he introduced impersonal, flattened figures, as in Femme à la mandoline (fig. 1; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the current work of the same title. In both of these canvases Braque revisited a classical subject--a woman seated with a musical instrument central to the composition--by juxtaposing geometric planes of color and pattern in order to achieve a sense of advancing and receding space. His revived interest in brilliant color, decoration and rhythmical patterning serve as an ornamental background to the strongly curved outlines of the figure and musical elements in particular.
(fig. 1) Georges Braque, Femme à la mandoline, 1937. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.