Poster, Georges Braque, The Castle of la Roche-Guyon

Dimensions: 50 x 70 cm

To build a picture of many geometric shapes:
Braque spent the summer of 1909 in La Roche-Guyon. The landscape on the Seine River, a few miles west of Paris, fascinated him.
He wrote in a letter to the art dealer Kahnweiler:
"Delighted to be here. The scenery is really very beautiful... I want to be as undisturbed as possible. I ask you not to give my address to anyone."
The desire to paint and the self-chosen isolation also yielded results: eight paintings from the village, five of which are of the medieval castle.
Here Paul Cezanne, whom Braque greatly admired, had made some important paintings 24 years earlier. In the spirit of Cezanne, Braque now makes this painting of the medieval castle creeping up the mountainside. But the painting goes further than Cezanne in simplification and has become one of the earliest examples of what is usually called faceted cubism, i.e. the parts of the landscape and buildings are organized at once architecturally and geometrically, as if in facets.

Coloristically, the picture is refined with its interplay between emerald green vegetation and ochre-colored architecture, but Braque soon abandons this seemingly realistic color scheme in favor of a more abstract color scheme, with black, white, gray and brown in various shades. Perhaps one can see The Castle of La Roche-Guyon as one of the artist's first Cubist masterpieces.

The motif on this poster is a work of art in the collection of Moderna Museet.

Art.no: MOM10

© Georges Braque/Copyright 2019. Photo: Moderna Museet, Sweden