Little Harbor in Normandy

Georges BraqueWW-1909-019313

1909·Oil on canvas·81.1 × 80.5 cm (32 × 31 3/4 in.)

In early 1908, Georges Braque began an artistic collaboration with Pablo Picasso. From 1909 until Braque was mobilized for World War I, they worked in creative dialogue, breaking down and reformulating the representation of objects and their structure. In doing so, they pioneered one of the most radical artistic revolutions of the twentieth century, Cubism. Little Harbor in Normandy is the first fully realized example of Braque’s early Cubist style. He described the English Channel coast in severe geometries and a sober palette, reduced in range and intensity to pale shades of color. His compressed treatment of space and use of a shifting perspective seems to propel the two sailboats forward to the front edges of the picture. To further energize the scene, the artist added a fringe of whitecaps to the sea and dashes of clouds across the sky. His repetitive, striated modeling of form, inspired by his study of the art of Paul Cézanne, increased the rigid tension of this canvas. Documentation suggests that Little Harbor in Normandy was exhibited in Paris in March 1909 at the Salon des Indépendants, making this painting the first major Cubist work to be shown in such a prominent venue.

Catalogue

Year: 1909
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 81.1 × 80.5 cm (32 × 31 3/4 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Georges Braque

Artist

Georges Braque

Sculpture

A co-founder of Cubism, Georges Braque initially worked in a Fauvist style under the influence of Henri Matisse before embracing the style of Matisse’s great rival, Picasso. Born in 1882 in France, Braque moved to Paris at age seventeen where he found work as a decorative painter, a skill he had learned from his father. By 1904 he was able to establish his own studio and pursue painting full-time, and he exhibited several Fauvist canvases in his first exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants of 1906. A year later, however, he had a transformational experience visiting the studio of Pablo Picasso, where he saw the seminal 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. From that point forward, Braque abandoned Fauvism, and established a close friendship with Picasso. It was also at this time that he began experimenting with other mediums, such as collage, drawing, and, later, sculpture.

Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France

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