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Picasso-Braque Comparison Essay

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During the 1920s and early 1930s, Braque painted a series of still lifes representing a return to a Cézannian means of expressing depth and surface composition. As an heir of Cezanne, Braque had inherited the possibility of applying to painting the economy and precision traditional in the craftsman milieu from which he came. The two great influences on Braque’s development were Cézanne’s work and his relationship with Picasso; an understanding of the complexity of the Picasso-Braque reciprocity is necessary in order to interpret the stylistic differences that finally separated the two artists. In Verre, pomme, serviette et pipe, as with other works executed during the same period, Braque was experimenting with a heightened abstraction of form and the elision of space, light and perspective. The final result of Braque’s effort, which was painted in 1931, is something of a doctrinaire pre-World War II Cubist (kemper) composition, having generated the tactile space through the use of overlap, translucency and the repetition of both form and color. From the muted venetian red of the apple to the gradated burnt umber of the background planes, which are articulated like panels on a screen, the artist has tapped into the heavy, earthen palette HE FAVORED? we find in other works produced in the 1930s. He composed his …show more content…

As the artist said in his own words, “There are people who say: ‘What is your picture of?...What?...There’s an apple, obviously, there’s…I don’t know…Ah yes! A plate, next to it…’ These people appear to fail utterly to appreciate that what is between the apple and the plate is being painted as well. And, to be honest…the space between seems to me to be as essential an element as what they call the object.” (Ditto

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