Georges Braque: Surface and Space

Georges Braque: Surface and Space

June 22, 2016 to September 11, 2016

This instal­la­tion fea­tures works by Georges Braque, offer­ing a per­spec­tive into the artist’s explo­ration of the ten­sion between painter­ly sur­faces and illu­sion. The ear­li­est works in the focus show reveal Braque’s Cubist era-con­cerns for fac­ture and the pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lage. The lat­er works respond to these pre-World War I inno­va­tions. In still lifes and images of the mod­el in the stu­dio, Braque com­pli­cat­ed the con­nec­tion between tex­ture and rep­re­sen­ta­tion using trompe l’oeil tech­niques and cre­at­ing sur­faces acti­vat­ed with sand, grav­el, and oth­er sub­stances. The artist’s explo­ration of this rela­tion­ship pos­es inter­est­ing ques­tions about appear­ance and real­i­ty in mod­ern art. More­over, the works’ nego­ti­a­tion of abstrac­tion and rep­re­sen­ta­tion com­pound these ques­tions, demon­strat­ing the com­plex­i­ty and provoca­tive dynamism of Braque’s oeuvre.

While undoubt­ed­ly signs of Braque’s mod­ernist ten­den­cies, the works in this exhi­bi­tion also man­i­fest Braque’s atten­tion to the past. Each devel­ops a tra­di­tion­al sub­ject or theme from the his­to­ry of art—landscape, music, still-life, and the artist’s model—but Braque’s for­mal approach­es under­mine many of the estab­lished con­ven­tions. The con­nec­tion between mod­ernism and his­to­ry high­lights the Janus-faced nature of much avant-garde art in the first 40 years of the 20th century.