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Pool table

Georges Braque • Painting, 1945, 89.1×116.3 cm
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About the artwork
This artwork was added since it is referred to in the materials below
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Interior
Style of art: Art Nouveau
Technique: Oil, Sand
Materials: Canvas
Date of creation: 1945
Size: 89.1×116.3 cm
Artwork in selections: 5 selections
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Description of the artwork «Pool table»

"Billiard table" – the clearest example of the late style of Georges Braque. With its subtlety, specificity, harmonies of green, brown and grey shades, with a free use of line, plane, and shaped parts.

Shortly before and during the Second World war in the works of Georges Braque experiencing significant change. His paintings are greatly reduced in size, and the plots become serious and even grim. One of the most frequent – still life "Vanitas" with human skulls. But soon after the liberation of Paris from occupation in August 1944, the Marriage begins to write a series of seven paintings pool tables. Three major paintings from this cycle are located in the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of contemporary art in Caracas. It is likely that such a story has attracted a Marriage as a sort of challenge: how to write such an impressive object, like a billiard table without using the traditional term?

And the artist... just fold it like a book. The table dominates this complex composition filled with decorative elements like detailed veneer or colored the accounts in the background. Left a straw hat, a scarf and a curved line, resembling a shoulders – perhaps a coat hanging on the back of the chair – creating the effect of human presence. The inscription, which can be read as La loi sur l'ivresse (Law against drunkenness), recalls the fragments of words and phrases that Marriage and Picasso included in their cubist work.

The freedom to invent, to dream and to move away from realism was a Central element in the approach of Marriage to painting. Although the main parts of the songs the artist has worked in the preliminary drawings, he liked to describe his method of work is based on spectacular discoveries: "I never know what will be the result. The picture makes itself work under the brush. The picture is every time an adventure".

Author: Evgeny Sidelnikov.
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