“There is in nature a tactile space. I might almost say a manual space […] This is the space that fascinated me so much, because that is what early Cubist painting was, a research into space.”
—Georges Braque Painted in 1911-1912, within the short period of intensive creative exchange and ferment that would mark the high point of the early, analytical phase of Cubism, George Braque’s La bouteille de Bass is an exceptional work from this defining chapter of painterly modernism. Working, as Braque would famously term it, like “a pair of climbers roped together,” he and Picasso would scale remarkable heights in these decisive years, pushing painting into radical new territory as they overturned centuries of pictorial tradition.ⁱ While they had worked closely together in Paris, the innovations of one inspiring further feats of painterly daring in the other, in the spring of 1911 Braque was leading the charge. As John Richardson details, it was Braque who intensified the Cubist grid with the introduction of oval canvases, and who first applied stencil lettering to his compositions, experiments that would be most fully interrogated and extended by the two artists in Céret that summer, where they worked more closely together than ever before. While Picasso would redefine the terms of Cubist perspective, it was Braque who “invented the space in which Cubist objects could live and breathe.”ⁱⁱ

 

Acquired first by Braque’s dealer and the early supporter of Cubism, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, before its purchase by renowned collector and writer Alphonse Kann, La bouteille de Bass has an illustrious pedigree and rich history. A principal influence, as many believe, for Charles Swann—the protagonist of Marcel Proust’s ambitious novel cycle, Á la recherche du temps perdu—Kann was widely respected for his discerning eye, amassing one of the most important collections of works by artists of the early 20^th century avant-garde between 1927 and 1938, when he was forced to flee Paris as the threat of war pressed closer. Hung alongside other masterworks of the era (including, incidentally, an example of Fernand Léger’s Fumées sur les toits, not unlike the work from the Triton Collection Foundation being offered concurrently), La bouteille de Bass exemplifies the pictorial experiments pioneered by Braque in this crucial year. The present work was confiscated from Kann during the Nazi occupation of France in June of 1940, but restituted to his possession after the war, in 1947.

 

Built up in luminous passages of whites, greys, and ochre tones, the surface of the work is activated through a series of rhythmic exchanges between curvilinear forms and more rigidly rendered line, and the fluctuations of shorter, more densely worked brushstrokes against delicate, transparently rendered layers. Working within and against the Cubist grid here, these syncopated elements combine and detach from one another in a masterful illustration of Braque’s visual choreography which the artist described as “a matter of harmony, or rapports, of rhythm, and–most important for my own work–of ‘metamorphosis.’”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Pearlescent highlights cause the eye to dance more freely across the composition, a lilting, even musical effect recalling perhaps Braque’s own love of instrumentation and his more explicit statements regarding the relationship of still life to notation whereby “a vase in a still life delineated a void just as a phrase in music delineated silence.”^iv An accomplished flautist and enthusiastic concertina player, Braque filled his studio with instruments and paper constructions of his own creation. These constructions offer real-world correlates to John Golding’s emphasis on Braque’s notion of le tableau object and the extent to which the Cubists “saw their paintings as constructed objects having their own existence, as small, self-contained worlds, not reflecting the outside world but recreating it in a completely new form.”^v Although many of his still lifes would directly incorporate the more familiar forms of violins and guitars as a way of anchoring his increasingly fragmented compositions, the combinations of solid forms and open cavities that characterize stringed instruments in particular, must surely have informed his most audacious attempts to overcome notions of the object as a unified, singular entity by opening it up to the space surrounding it. 

 

Cubism, Cézanne, and the Still Life 

 

“In a still life space is tactile, even manual, while the space of a landscape is a visual space.”
—Georges BraqueMore than any other subject, from this point on still life would remain the primary mode of Braque’s investigations into the nature of perception, drawing especially from Paul Cézanne’s treatment of everyday objects arranged in space. Although Braque was certainly already familiar with Cézanne’s work, the 1907 retrospective held at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune brought together more paintings by the artist than had ever been seen before. This exhibition enabled a much deeper appreciation and more forensic understanding of Cézanne’s fractured geometries, volumetric masses, and—most importantly for Braque—his pioneering treatment of the space surrounding and separating objects as of equal importance and substance as the objects themselves. Although Braque applied these lessons first to a series of landscapes produced in the summer of 1908 in L’Estaque—acknowledged as the first truly Cubist canvases by the likes of Henri Matisse, Kahnweiler, and the acerbic critic Louis Vauxcelles—it would be in still life painting, rather than landscape or portraiture that Braque would most fully apply and extend these lessons. 

 

 

While both Braque and Picasso would find in Cézanne the key to breaking with the traditional single-point perspective, Picasso pursued a line of pictorial inquiry more directly related to the sculptural reality of the object, its composition, and his deconstruction of it; for Braque, the tactile qualities of space itself would come to take precedence. While the fragmentation of form had allowed him to establish a “spatial element” in his paintings that would be carried over into “spatial movement,” it would be in turning to still life that he would most assertively extend these experiments making, for the first time, the “relationship between the moving subject and the resting, palpable object available to experience.”^vi

 

Unlike the landscape, to which we more readily anchor ourselves from a distant, single perspective, the objects arranged by the hand of the artist on a tabletop enabled a more immediate appreciation of what Braque described as “tactile space,” capturing at once the movement towards and around the object and the durational aspect of this experience. Arranged on a horizontal and vertical axis and structured through the rhythmic intersections of line enforced by the architecture of the grid here, the objects of La bouteille de Bass—including the titular bottle of beer and transparent glasses—are shattered into openness with the surrounding space. Conforming to what Douglas Cooper identified as a defining aspect of the Céret period where “broken brushwork [was] used to create a luminous palpitation, to differentiate between planes and to make the surface of the canvas more vibrant and tactile,” the surface of La bouteille de Bass is brilliantly animated, realizing the plastic potential of this tactile treatment of space.^vii

 

Wonderfully evocative of this heady atmosphere of café culture, intellectual debate, and painterly daring, La bouteille de Bass incorporates a favorite motif of both Braque and Picasso’s: the letters of the Bass bottle, with the label pulled apart in the present work to reinforce this sense of perspectival multivalency. Anticipating the next great Cubist innovation of papier collé, the letters introduce a real-world element to the composition, “forms which were outside space and therefore immune to deformation.”^viii They also sound a more playful note, the shifting B and ASSE fragments not only announcing the branded beer, but also drawing on the French term, bas, meaning “low.” 

 

 

Towards the lower edge of La bouteille de Bass, Braque’s inclusion of a beautifully rendered and legible oyster anchors the more abstracted elements of the canvas, its silky texture and opalescent qualities echoed in the dancing highlights of white and grey tones that repeat throughout the composition. No doubt a familiar bar food for of the two painters during their stay near the coast in Céret, the oyster also holds an important place in the history of still life painting, making prominent appearances in the canvases of Jean-Siméon Chardin, Philippe Rousseau, and Édouard Manet. An early example of what would become a favorite motif of Braque’s still lifes in later years, the oyster here seems to announce Braque’s alignment to the masters of the still life tradition while emphasizing the radical new territory that Cubism would push the genre.

 

 

ⁱ Georges Braque, quoted in Richard Friedenthal, ed., Letters of the Great Artists, London, 1963, p. 264. 

ⁱⁱ  John Golding, “Braque and the Space of Still Life,” in Braque: Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat., Hayward / South Bank Centre, London, 1990, n.p.

ⁱⁱⁱ  Dieter Buchhart, “Georges Braque: The World as Still Life,” in Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2011, p. 50. 

^iv  John Richardson, Life of Picasso, p. 150. 

^v  Golding, Cubism, London, 1968, pp. 93-94. 

^vi  Buchhart, ibid., pp. 54, 56.

^vii  Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, London 1994, p.53.

^viii  Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1907-1917: The Painter of Modern Life, London, 1996, p. 190.