Georges Braque (1882-1963)

A master of the still life as few in the Twentieth century could claim, Georges Braque saw himself as the heir of Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Paul Cézanne, and ennobled the most mundane objects through a clear and implacably strict inner logic, the underpinnings of which were based on pictorial solutions he and Pablo Picasso had proposed when they created Cubism. Braque wholly disregarded the prevailing tendencies toward Surrealism, Expressionism, and the return to realism. He set about exclusively applying the constructs of Cubism, which was for him a limitless language, the fundamental rhetoric of which could never be exhausted. Douglas Cooper has written:

Still life has always been the specialty of Braque's genius. Seldom has painting been used to confer so much enchantment on such ordinary things. Like Chardin before him, Braque takes us into the salon, the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining-room, even into his own studio in pursuit of reality: nothing is too humble to find a place in one of his pictures...So, from the lowliest objects Braque extracts a new poetry as he paints, and our experience of the world becomes fuller and more exciting. If we will look, Braque will teach us to see, and this, after all, is the highest function of the true artist (in G. Braque, London, 1956, pp. 14-15).