Les Franciscaines acquire a work by Georges Braque
Les Franciscaines dévoilent le nouveau trésor de son musée : une œuvre graphique d’un peintre emblématique de l’avant-garde artistique française du XXe siècle.
With its ambitious acquisition policy, the City of Deauville is committed to enriching its collections with works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by major artists and figures of the great artistic movements. It is in this context that it acquired a graphic work by Georges Braque (1882-1963) at a public auction last June.
Georges Braque has distinguished himself in the great artistic movements of the twentieth century. Initially a Fauvist in the wake of Matisse, Derain and Othon Friesz, he then embraced the path of Cubism, of which he became one of the leaders alongside Pablo Picasso. Together, they represented, through geometric construction, three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional planes and disrupted the art of the twentieth century without, however, crossing the threshold of abstraction. After the First World War, during which he was seriously wounded, Braque did not pursue his cubist research and returned to compositions where planes and lines still play a major role, treated in powerful chromatic scales.
This work by Georges Braque comes from the collection of André Malraux. The two men met in 1920 and formed an unbreakable bond of friendship.
Supported by Malraux then Minister of Cultural Affairs, Braque is entrusted with important public orders for monumental decorations. Ciel et oiseau acquired by the Musée des Franciscaines is a preparatory study for the realization of a mosaic for the facade of the new Faculty of Science in Paris. The death of Braque in 1963 puts an end to the realization of this project.
The motif of the bird appears in Georges Braque's work from the 1910s and will be treated until the end of his life. The pure and schematic drawing of the bird, which here reaches a great maturity of execution, testifies to the painter's attraction to archaic art and more broadly to the so-called primitive arts. This motif is also used in another decoration; that of the ceiling of the Henri II room in the Louvre Museum, painted in 1953, illustrating birds flying in a night sky.
Having spent his childhood in Le Havre, Georges Braque remained very attached, throughout his life, to Normandy. In 1928, he bought a house in Varengeville in the current department of Seine-Maritime. He set up his studio there and created numerous paintings until his death. A true land of inspiration, he also created five stained glass windows in 1956 for the church of Saint-Valery. He is buried in the cemetery of Varengeville where his grave is overhung by a mosaic representing a bird, the dove of the messenger who watches over its author.
