Odysseus

Alex Danchev has written, “From his desk or his bed—he was a night reader—Braque fed the inner man. This one was the gourmet. The past is a hypothesis, he said, but it was the ancient world, more hypothetical than most, that held his attention” (Georges Braque: A Life, New York, 2005, p. 194). Braque, the avid bibliophile, was well-read in Ancient Greek literature. In 1931, Ambroise Vollard came to Braque to commission a series of etchings for a special edition artist’s book to accompany a well-known text of antiquity. Braque immediately chose Hesiod’s Theogony, an epic poem from 730-700 BC detailing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. It was through this project that Braque indubitably put pastel to paper to create two large scale panels: Circe and Odysseus. During this period, an interviewer described Braque as “seduced by the names, tracing the ancient letters like a magic spell” (ibid., p. 196). The Greek text provided ample inspiration, leading Braque to create several different explorations through oil, pastel and even plaster.