Monet to Matisse Audio Guide: Self-Guided Audio Tour
Work 10 of 11

Georges Braque, Still Life with Fish, 1941. 

In this painting, two black fish, a jug and a cut lemon make a harmonious and eye-popping spread. Indeed, tabletops, plates and jugs were some of the first objects that the French artist Georges Braque deconstructed with his revolutionary approach to painting, in the early 1900s. 

Braque founded the art movement known as Cubism alongside Pablo Picasso and is considered one of the most innovative French painters of the twentieth century.  

In Cubism, what is in front of us, can be painted from many viewpoints. All at once.

And these multiplied perspectives further freed the artist from representing objects and people as we see them with our eyes. And brought them closer to how we understand the visual, with our mind. 

Georges Braque was born into an art-loving family in the painting and decorating trade in the port city of Le Havre. As a teenager, he worked as a house painter during the day and a student of fine art at night. In his late teens he moved to the centre of the art world, Paris and went to an art school where he met fellow creatives like Marie Laurencin, whose work you can see in this exhibition .

In 1907, Braque was introduced to his neighbour in Montparnasse, the twenty-six year old Picasso. The two became friends, then painting-companions, then rivals. Braque later said that over the six years they spent together, the pair saw each other every day. 

The Cubist approach was not just a free-for-all.  Braque and Picasso started off painting in a manner known as analytical cubism, exploring geometric forms, planes of sight and rules for their new style. But as it evolved, they returned to more recognisable subjects,  such as the still life we see here. 

In Still Life with Fish, painted more than 20 years after his intense collaboration with Picasso, Braque’s  approach has softened. By 1941, World War II had erupted and Paris was under German occupation. Braque paints not from his studio, but two rooms in his apartment and he works on a series of bold still lives from his kitchen. This painting becomes a study in pattern. Braque flattens the different planes of the image into a single, highly decorated surface of textures and forms.  

Braque himself knew well the horrors of war. He’d been seriously injured on the battlefield in World War 1. He’d lost his close friend due to Nazi persecution. And Braque’s Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg, had had to flee to New York. 

While Picasso employed a Cubist lens to create his monumental painting Guernica, an anguished protest at Nazi atrocity, Braque’s focus remained inward. He maintained that for him, art and politics were separate. 

In Still Life with Fish, this calm meditation on form and pattern, Braque carried on amid a world once more torn apart by violence.