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GEORGES BRAQUE
Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece (1913)
Oil on canvas
81cm X 60cm/ 3l 7/8in X 23 5/8 in

Georges Braque had not the protean sensibil-ity or the Expressionistic urgency of his friend and colleague Pablo Picasso; yet he may be considered as the most important and innova-tive painter of still life in this century. His de-dication to the 'pictorial fact' led him to ex-plore, more fully perhaps than any other artist, the environment immediate to his practice.

Braque was born in May 1882 at Argenteuil on the Seine near Paris, but his family moved eight years later to Le Havre on the north coast, where his father started a domestic painting business. Braque himself began an apprenticeship in this trade while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. He established a long friendship with the Dufy brothers, Raoul (1877-1953) and Gaston, at this time. His move to Paris in 1900 was inter-rupted by military service from 1901 to 1904. Back in the capital, Braque spent the next two years at the Academic Humbert and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, often painting with the Le Havrais artists Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy. In 1906 and 1907 his painting embraced a stylized Fauve manner, before his crucial en-counter with Picasso and Picasso's recent painting Lcs demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. The history of the association of these two great painters is the early history of Cubism; until 1914 they worked intensely to co-produce the most revolutionary visual style since Renaiss-ance perspective.

Unlike Picasso, for whom the 1920s and 1930s were decades of prolific eclecticism, Braque grafted and consolidated his previous ideas. In the last years of his life (he died in 1963), Braque produced two astonishing series. Ateliers (1948-1955) and Oiseaux (1950-1958); and he was feted ceremonially as the grand master of French twentieth-century painting. The dominant influences on Braque's early career were Cezanne and Picas-so. (Braque's metaphor for his relationship to Picasso at this time is revealing: he spoke of them as roped together like 'mountain climbers'.) Having rejected Impressionism and his own decorative, curvilinear version of Fauvism, Braque moved away from coloristic ex-cess, in pursuit of greater structural coherence across the picture surface.

The impact of Braque's painting on younger generations has, of course, been immense. Juan Gris, Fernand Leger (1881-1955) and the 'Salon Cubists' attempted to imitate, often directly, the Analytic and Synthetic periods of Braque and Picasso. But the stylistic influence of the years 1909 to 1914 became more diffuse.

During the first part of Braque's career - up to 1920 - he worked almost exclusively as a painter and producer of collages. But the formative significance of his early interior de-corating work, possibly the major impetus be-hind the incorporation of pasted paper and other materials on to the canvas surface,appears to have fueled his appetite for tech-nical experiment. He tested different materials and processes in periodic bursts of activity, which recurred throughout his later career. In 1920 he produced his first real piece of sculp-ture, Standing Nude in plaster, and woodcuts for Piege de Meduse by the composer Erik Satie (1866-1925).

Braque has been credited with many of the most important technical 'inventions' of Cub-ism during the movement's early years, 1907 to 1914. He was the first to introduce lettering; to make use of a paint comb; to introduce pas-sages of imitation wood graining and mar-bling; to vary the texture of paint by mixing with sand and other ingredients, and finally to discover the technique of papier colle. During this period Braque's commitment to intense pictorial experiment was considerable.

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece is a fully convincing, mature example of the style of Analytical Cubism which Picasso and Bra-que developed between 1909 and 1912. Analy-tic Cubism is so called because of the division (or analysis) of the work's subject (usually still life, as here, or portrait) and the space which surrounds it, into a series of angular planes (or facets), which record various types of informa-tion as the motifs are seen from more than one point of view.

There are several phases of Analytical Cubism, and Clarinet and Bottle - almost certainly painted in the summer of 1911 in Ceret in the Pyrenees where both Braque and Picasso were staying - comes in the last and most complex of these, appropriately called 'Hermetic' Cub-ism, where the subject becomes often very hard to identify, but never fully disappears. In this work, for example, the clarinet and glimp-ses of sheet music can be readily discerned; as well as a nail or pin and its shadow; a variety of 'scroll-like corbets'; and several letters sten-ciled onto the surface, 'VALSE' being the only complete word.

The canvas used is linen and is of a simple weave. It has been primed in grey primary oil, and worked over with brushstrokes ranging in direction and register. The overall con-figuration of the objects and the dominant di-agonally orientated facet marks were probably mapped on to the canvas first, possibly from a sketch, followed by the versatile 'stippling' technique with the brush, which is typical of works from this period and produces a mottled effect that can act both as a kind of shad-ing device, and a mode of partial coloring in.

Braque's palette is characteristically reduced to white, black, raw sienna, with a touch of lemon and a stroke of red in the bottom right. These pigments are laid on fairly densely in places, with some quite considerable gradients of impasto. As a final touch Braque appears to have added a few slim lines in charcoal, perhaps structural afterthoughts.

The subject matter here is ostensibly a still life, but, taking his lead from Cezanne, Braque gives such priority to an abstract and intellectual analysis of the spatial structure of the mantelpiece, clarinet and bottle of rum wlhcli is his motif, that both style and teciinique are dominated by this informing logic. In comparison with other Analytic Cubist works of tlie same period Clarinet and Bottle of Rum i's less densely worked and its ochre patcfies flatter and more sparse.

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