Friday, February 11, 2011

Georges Braque's "Landscape At La Ciotat"


This is "Landscape at La Ciotat" by Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 23 3/8" (71.7 x 59.4 cm). Before Braque met Pablo Picasso, with whom he invented Cubism, he painted in the bright, bold colors shared by the Fauves, a loosely affiliated group of artists that also included Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Raoul Dufy. They were given this name—meaning "wild beasts"—by an unsympathetic critic in 1905, as a result of the high-pitched colors and anti-naturalistic rendering they embraced. In the summer of 1907 Braque worked in the resort town of La Ciotat, near Marseilles, where he painted this landscape using heavy outlines, flattened space, and intense, harmonic colors (information from the gallery caption).

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