His most famous painting (violin and candlestick) – Georges Braque

Georges Braque was an eminent 20th century French painter and sculptor, who was also a co-founder of ‘Cubism’. Born on May 13, 1882 in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, from 1897 to 1899, he learned painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, the city where he grew up. He began his artistic journey, experimenting with styles such as ‘impressionism’ and ‘fauvism’, before developing ‘cubism’ together with Pablo Picasso in 1908. Cezanne’s art of ‘multiple perspectives’, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne , in 1907, inspired the duo towards ‘cubism’. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a painting by Braque in 1908 and called it “cubism” or “strange cubiques”. He perceived the artwork as “full of little cubes”. This led to the christening of Picasso and Georges’ invention as ‘Cubism’, which the duo were initially unenthusiastic about. Braque’s magnum opus “Violin and Candelabra”, painted in the spring of 1910, exemplifies the vibrant personality of the ‘Cubist’ style of painting.

Mostly monochrome in style and ‘Still Life’ themed, Braque’s ‘Cubist’ works mostly surprised the art community. This 24″ x 19 3/4″ (61 cm x 50 cm) oil on canvas, “Violin and Candlestick,” is the result of amalgamation of fragments of music and violin sheet music rearranged at unusual angles to create a single image. intertwined, with the surface movement of shapes, planes, arcs and colors. The painting, while illustrating a three-dimensional view of the subjects on a flat canvas, eschews the traditional ‘Renaissance’ perspective. This is actually ‘cubism’, which focuses on depicting the subjects, viewed from various angles.

“Violin and Chandelier” was the result of Georges’s obsession with form and stability, fueled by a desire to create an illusion in the mind of the viewer to move freely within the painting. To achieve this, the painter clustered the subjects in the center of a grid like armor and covered the boundaries of the outlined objects in black using earth-tone colors. In this way, he succeeded in transforming volumes from statics to maintain composite surfaces on a flat plane, allowing viewers to appreciate form more than any other angle. Recognizing and astutely understanding the effects of light to elicit emotions and appropriate effects from subjects also served as a vital parameter for Braque’s “Violin and Candelabra.” He expressed this art of fragmentation as “a technique to get closer to the object.”

Georges Braque expired on August 31, 1963 in Paris. His masterpiece, “Violin and Candelabra” is on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.