Houses at L’Estaque

Georges Braque, 1908, oil on canvas,

Museum of Fine Arts, Berne, Switzerland

Background• Painted in the

summer of 1908 at L’Estaque

• Braque’s idol Cézanne had painted before him

• One of the earliest and “truly cubist” works for the formal analysis and abstraction of objects and space

• Rejected by the Salon d'Automne

• Fortunately exhibited that autumn at Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler's Paris gallery.

• Painted from a photograph of a view that Braque had L’Estaque (photo taken by Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer at the time)

• While Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles“ (1907) cleared the ground, Cubism was a joint construction. Both artists went on to a new approach to organising pictorial space that is Cubism.

Type of Cubism

• Analytical Cubism because… - High concentration of geometric forms - Scale and perspective have disappeared; forms are simplified into blocks - No distinction between foreground and background; the shapes of the painting seem to be stacked on top of each other - Use of mutes greys, browns and ocres. - Analytical Cubism was mostly practised by Braque.

Subject• Braque depicts the houses of a French fishing

village not far from Marseille.• All details have been eliminated and the

foliage of the trees reduced to a minimum to reveal the geometric severity of the houses.

• Analytical Cubism allows the form and colour of the houses to be simplified down to the appearance of cardboard boxes

• Also allowed Braque to take full possession of he saw and invented a non-naturalistic way of representing things and expressing spatial relationships.

• The cliff and the houses further up the painting are treated as a continuous limiting background plane: we can’t tell where one finishes and the other starts.

Use of light and colour

• Analytical Cubism uses a limited colour palette of mostly dark and muted colours

• Although the plane appears to be flat, tonal intensity does vary across the plane and is clearly seen through the use of vigorous brushstrokes

• Colour is not used descriptively, nor atmospherically: analytical cubism means the colours and tones of objects are depicted darker than they are in reality.

• Here, the atmosphere looks similar to that of a storm in the autumn when it was actually painted in the summer, most likely on a clear day

• The brown and green palette also predicts a palette that Braque employed in many paintings to come, eg “Violin and Pitcher” (1910)

CompositionThese simple landscape paintings showed Braque's determination to break imagery into dissected parts. The trees continue upwards almost to the top of the canvas so that the eye is allowed to escape beyond them

There is no central vanishing point; in many of the houses, all the canons of traditional perspective are completely broken

The picture plane is further emphasized by the complete lack of aerial perspective (the far houses are, darker and stronger in value than the foreground house) The fact that occasionally contours (outlines) are broken and forms opened up into each other.

Distances between one point and another are expressed by lines, forming a structure of verticals, diagonals and horizontals to guide the eye and hold the composition togetherThe tress also act as a frame around the houses

Summary…• Braque mostly practiced

Analytical Cubism • Forms have been reduced

to a minimum to reveal the geometric forms

• No sense of scale or perspective

• No central point• The composition has a

variety of linear emphasises

• The colour palette for this piece paves the way for Braque’s future works.