- Fishing Boats
- Barques de pêche
Frame: 48 1/4 × 40 7/8 in. (122.6 × 103.8 cm)
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Georges Braque's style of painting forever transformed the world of art.
He met Pablo Picasso around 1907, and together they would create a revolutionary manner of visualizing reality, breaking free from the traditional means of portraying perspective on a two-dimensional surface. Fishing Boats was produced during the first year of their close association. Soon the two artists formulated and produced the initial works of Analytical Cubism.
The term Cubism came from French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, an enemy of the avant-garde. He described the early works of Braque and Picasso as reducing all elements to geometric diagrams or cubes. Fishing Boats depicts a typical fishing village on the Normandy coast, but Braque—eschewing a naturalistic or impressionistic rendering—chose to restrict his palette to subtle earth tones and to concentrate on the geometric shapes of boats and buildings. The paintings from this period helped to establish one of the significant developments in the history of 20th-century art.
Provenance[Galerie Kahnweiler, Paris]; [Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1930]; Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., New York, by 1940; Mrs. Marius de Zayas, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1965; [Perls Galleries, New York]; [Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, "Impressionist and Modern Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures," December 8-9, 1965, lot 60]; Allan Bluestein, Washington, D.C., 1965; [Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, "Highly Important Impressionist and Modern Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture: The Property of Allan Bluestein, Washington, D.C.," April 3, 1968, lot 15]; Mr. John A. and Mrs. Audrey Jones Beck, Houston, 1968–1974; given to MFAH, 1974.
Exhibition History"25th Salon des Artistes Indépendants," Paris, 1909. (Exhibited as Landscape).
"G. Braque," Basel, Kunsthalle, 1933.
"Georges Braque," Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd., London, 1934.
"The Cubist Epoch," Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1970–71.
"U.S. Loan Exhibition," National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1971–73.
"The Collection of John. A. and Audrey Jones Beck," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1974.
"Braque: The Late Paintings," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, April 14–June 14, 1983.
"Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 20, 1989–January 16, 1990; Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel, Switzerland, February 25–June 18, 1990.
"Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989.
Cataloguing data may change with further research.
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