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GEORGES BRAQUE
Argenteuil (Francia) 1882 - 1963 Parigi

"Still Life with Mandolin and Score"

31x36,5, oil on panel
Work signed lower right
Authentication by Armand Israel issued in Paris on February 18, 2025 Formerly Roland Balay Gallery, Paris (label on the back) French work, as per Certificato di Avvenuta Spedizione (CAS), valid until August 7, 2030, issued by the Ministry of Culture, Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Metropolitan City of Turin, Turin Export Office Bibl.: - Compare: "Catalogue de l'oeuvre de Georges Braque. Peintures 1936-1941", Maeght Editore, 1961, reproduced in color on an unnumbered page and in black and white on page 81 Accompanying a Cahier of lithographs dedicated to the collector dated November 26, 1959, "Dear Dr. Amedeo Piccinelli. Souvenir de Paris, le 26 Nov 1959. G. Braque" (�Cahier de George Braque 1917-1947�, 39 x 29 cm, printed on January 26, 1948 in Paris by the Mourlot brothers, containing 94 lithographs after George Braque. The edition was printed in 845 copies, 95 copies on Velin d'Arches (not for sale), containing a color lithograph, signed by the artist, and 750 copies on Velin du Marais which constitute the original edition) The painting comes from an important italian collection, where it has remained to this day. The collector, a doctor and a great art lover, lived in France in the 1940s and treated Braque, as evidenced by the Cahier of lithographs accompanying the work, dedicated to the collector on November 26, 1959, "Dear Dr. Amedeo Piccinelli. Souvenir de Paris, le 26 Nov 1959. G. Braque". ("Cahier de George Braque 1917-1947", 39 x 29, printed on January 26, 1948 in Paris by the Mourlot brothers, containing 94 lithographs d'aprA533;s by George Braque. The edition was printed in 845 copies, 95 copies on Velin d'Arches paper, not for sale, containing a color lithograph, signed by the artist, and 750 copies on Velin du Marais, which constitute the original edition.) "Still Life with Mandolin and Score" was purchased from the Roland Balay Gallery in Paris, as evidenced by the gallery label on the back of the work. The Roland Balay Gallery, located at 10 Avenue de Messine, was directed, from the 1930s to the 1940s, by Louis Carre; and Roland Balay, a French-American gallery owner, director of the famous Knoedler Gallery in New York until 1971. Balay decided to open the Parisian gallery precisely to cultivate his interest in artists such as Picasso, Braque and Klee. The painting depicts a still life, composed of objects typical of Cubist works: in the foreground, a mandolin and a sheet of music, resting on a table, and in the background, a bottle. The setting is that of an interior, with the background created using colored rectangular tiles, with some decorative elements along the left side of the work. The objects are painted in a two-dimensional manner, using a flattened perspective that eliminates the traditional illusionistic depth. The light comes from the white outlines, which delimit and abruptly cut out the profiles of the objects, but also define the space. They mark the transition between one tile of the background and another and create a luminous contrast with the black fields. The bright, unnatural colors of the background, as well as the decorative elements along the left edge of the painting, undoubtedly recall the experience of "Fauve" painting, but with a certain control over the application of color and the balance of the composition, in line with the teachings of Paul Cezanne. Reflecting Cezanne's influence (the retrospective dedicated to the master at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1907 was crucial in this regard), we also emphasize the essentiality of the objects' forms and the brushstrokes structured in rectangular tiles, two elements that render the painting an autonomous organism, governed by laws internal to its own structure. The central object of the painting's composition is undoubtedly the mandolin, which appears with a certain consistency in Braque's artistic career. His friendship with Raoul Dufy's brother, Gaston Dufy, from whom he took flute lessons, is the first evidence of his connection to music. Braque was the first to include a musical instrument in his paintings, and Picasso would follow suit (in fact, from the autumn of 1908, both began painting paintings with musical instruments, later incorporating the human figure), but Picasso preferred the guitar, a traditional Spanish instrument. The choice of the mandolin was both formal and symbolic. Indeed, the mandolin, positioned at the center of the composition, represents perspective deformation; that is, the instrument's shape bends to the compositional demands. Furthermore, the mandolin, together with the score, alludes to the conception, frequent in Parisian Symbolist culture, of music as the most immaterial art, capable of existing only in the mind. The musical instrument is the spatio-temporal synthesis of an object that does not play but could play along with the score, and symbolizes, in Apollinaire's words, "the dimension of the infinite, the immaterial, the spiritual" (cited in Jolanda Nigro Covre, "Picasso and Braque," in "Art Dossier: Cubismo", no. 58, June 1991, p. 17). The painting "Still Life with Mandolin and Score" is a mature composition by Braque, who no longer operates through the fragmentation of objects, the use of monochrome and muted hues, and a vertical compositional structure. The painter breaks away from his previous hermetic language to establish a relationship between reality and image in his works. Here Braque has his own personal language, with a careful recollection of his origins (the objects typical of Cubist paintings, the two-dimensional representation, the flattened perspective, the Cezanne model) but with a keen eye on the experiences of the Fauves and a more relaxed synthesis in the creation of a lived-in, familiar, homely, warm space, in which "the painting is no longer a dead portion of space" (cit. in Jean Metzinger, "Notes on Painting" in "Pan", October-November 1910, pp. 649-651).

GEORGES BRAQUE

"Still Life with Mandolin and Score"

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MARINO MARINI

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ALBERTO PASINI

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AROLDO BONZAGNI

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