Braque

Georges Braque is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, yet only a small part of his work is well known. This handsome book sheds new light on the art of this master and shifts the focus from his Cubist work to the great cycles of his mature years - the Interiors, Billiard Tables, Studios, and late Bird paintings. In Braque's later work, says John Golding, we see that he is able to demonstrate an increased freedom and poetic quality even while remaining truthful to the principles of Cubism. As in his Cubist still lifes, Braque regards the objects in his interiors in a detached manner, using them to define the spatial organization of the paintings, and he treats the figures that occasionally appear in these works in a similar way, totally fusing them with their setting. The artist's palette of darker tones also harks back to the Cubist years. But in the series of Billiard Tables, which dates from 1944 to 1949, Braque manipulates space with unusual boldness, using the table as a device with which to play visual tricks. And the later works also exhibit a poetic content, especially evident in the Bird paintings, with their quiet resonance and with space depicted without formal limits and defined only by the presence of the bird itself.