To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of painter and sculptor Georges Braque, Cannes hosts an exhibition of his prints and illustrations.
Paris is not the only French city to pay tribute to Braque this winter, as the city of Cannes is also organizing an exhibit. But while the exhibition at the Grand Palais in the capital, ‘Georges Braque: A Retrospective’, presents a large range of works from the multi-talented artist’s early Fauvist paintings to his Cubist masterpieces, the smaller event organized at the Centre d’Art la Malmaison, ‘George Braque, la magie de l’estampe’, focuses on the prints, lithographs and book illustrations the French painter created between 1921 and 1963.
There is no denying than Georges Braque was one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. A leading member from the outset of the Fauves group (the Wild Beast), along with Henri Matisse, Andre Dérain, and Maurice de Vlaminck, he then invented with his good friend and collaborator, Pablo Picasso, a new movement that would become known as cubism, the deconstruction and reconstruction of an object on the basis of geometric criteria.
Famous for his still lifes which depict objects such as guitars, pipes and pitchers, and then for his landscapes, birds and ateliers, the artist is also the inventor of the papier collé technique.
Less famous than the more flamboyant Picasso, Georges Braque had nonetheless a great influence on a lot of artists of the last century and the Cannes exhibit thus explores his work with many of the major post-World War I French writers and poets, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, René Char, Francis Ponge, Pierre Reverdy, and Saint-John Perse.
The 250 original prints on display, which include the landmark series of 16 etchings in black based on the Theogony of Hesiod and commissioned by art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard in 1932, show how the French master’s drawings sublimate the Surrealist texts of his famed counterparts.
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The exhibition ‘Georges Braque, la magie de l’estampe’, runs from 30th of November, 2013 until 27th of April, 2014. It is open every day (except Mondays) from 10am to 1pm and from 2pm to 6pm. Admission €3.50 with reduced tariff of €2.50 also available.
CONTACT DETAILS
Centre d’art la Malmaison
47, boulevard de la Croisette
06400 Cannes
Lead image courtesy Wikipaintings.org; image of lithograph – Georges Braque, Lettera amorosa, 1963, 32.5 x 25 cm © Claude Germain © Adagp Paris 2013
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