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拍品專文
Braque is well known for his still-lifes, finding in the genre manifold possibilities for experimentation with form. He had been wounded in the First World War, and his paintings of the 1920s in general show a softer naturalism than his fragmented, vigorously Cubist experiments carried out in tandem with Pablo Picasso in the years before the War. Nature morte à la pipe is one such work, in which Braque uses rounded forms and curved lines as well as sharp verticals and horizontals. The scene comprises an assortment of objects arranged on a bright green tablecloth; among them a jar, a lemon, a pomegranate and a white pipe. The power of the composition lies not in the subject matter, but in the supreme painterly control Braque exercises over the spatial relationships between the objects. The creased green cloth, slipping from the table, forms a stage for the objects. The large jar is echoed by the split pomegranate and the small cluster of nuts in the foreground, also dissected by a black line. The lemon and long-stemmed pipe are bright yellow and white respectively. A palette of black, tawny browns, white and bright lemon-yellow is typical for Braque’s work in these years, lending them a sense of the unexpected.
Braque plays with the eye of the viewer, and an important element of the present work lies in his use of light. Half of the large jar is cast abruptly in black shadow. Looking closer, almost the whole goblet is in shade, and each object is ringed with a creeping darkness. Behind the table a black, irregular shape is outlined against the brown wall. This work is an excellent example of Braque’s return to a more naturalistic approach to still-life painting, and it retains the artist’s famed sense of the striking and incongruous. The table cloth and a wrinkled piece of white paper, perhaps a wrapper, are distressed, irregularly-shaped objects. They contrast with the hard roundness of the ceramic jar and fully shaped fruit.
“When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...” Braque explained in 1954, “I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting–the quest for space” (quoted in R. Friedenthal and D. Woodward, Letters of the Great Artists, From Blake to Pollock, New York, 1963, p. 264). Nature morte à la pipe represents this crucial element of Braque’s quest as a painter; he gives the objects he paints a tactile quality that is conveyed visually.
Braque plays with the eye of the viewer, and an important element of the present work lies in his use of light. Half of the large jar is cast abruptly in black shadow. Looking closer, almost the whole goblet is in shade, and each object is ringed with a creeping darkness. Behind the table a black, irregular shape is outlined against the brown wall. This work is an excellent example of Braque’s return to a more naturalistic approach to still-life painting, and it retains the artist’s famed sense of the striking and incongruous. The table cloth and a wrinkled piece of white paper, perhaps a wrapper, are distressed, irregularly-shaped objects. They contrast with the hard roundness of the ceramic jar and fully shaped fruit.
“When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...” Braque explained in 1954, “I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting–the quest for space” (quoted in R. Friedenthal and D. Woodward, Letters of the Great Artists, From Blake to Pollock, New York, 1963, p. 264). Nature morte à la pipe represents this crucial element of Braque’s quest as a painter; he gives the objects he paints a tactile quality that is conveyed visually.