Braque, Le Viaduc à L'Estaque, (The Viaduct at L'Estaque), 1908

Georges Braque, Le Viaduc à L'Estaque, (The Viaduct at L'Estaque), 1908, oil on canvas, 28-5/8 x 23-1/4 inches or 72.5 x 59 cm (Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

For more: http://smarthistory.org/the-viaduct-at-lestaque.html

(piano playing)

Dr. Zucker: We're in the Pompidou in Paris
and we're looking at a Georges Braque,

it's an early Braque.

It was painted just after Cézanne
died, Braque went down to the
stock in almost a kind of homage,

[unintelligible] to work through
Cézanne style in his late paintings.

Dr. Harris: You can see the viaduct
that you see in many Cézanne paintings

and the same palette that you
see in Cézanne and that same
kind of hatching brushwork

that you see also in Cézanne,
but things are changed.

Braque has seen Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, the space is really compressed.

Dr. Zucker: His meeting Picasso
and seeing how Picasso is, in
a sense, filtering Cézanne,

not to mention other artists
including Matisse at this
point, is having an impact here.

It's these paintings that Braque
is bringing back that Picasso sees
that really pushes Picasso forward.

We're talking about a compression, that
ridge wants to be in the background,

but it also pushes forward in
some really aggressive ways.

The sky above it seems to push
forward even more in some ways,

so that the entire canvas seems
to crest up and towards us.

Dr. Harris: The buildings
in the foreground seem to,
in a way, crest up and back,

so that the viaduct in the
background and the houses ... it
feels like there's no middle ground.

Dr. Zucker: Right, how
does he pull that off?

Dr. Harris: I see a lot of
reduction to geometric forms.

I see rectangles and triangles and
pyramid shapes and semi-circular shapes

almost as if the houses
look like mountains and the
mountains look like houses

and the trees look like the sky.

It's hard not to see this through
the lens of the dissolution of form

that's going to happen
with analytic cubism.

Dr. Zucker: The colors are very
much the colors of analytic
cubism, grey's and brown.

You've got the grey-blues up at the top,

you've got the grey-blues
in the shadows down below.

You've got those beige's and
brown's and red's throughout.

There's real continuity across
the surface of the canvas
just articulating the surface.

Dr. Harris: You also have those eliding
of forms that you see slightly later on

in analytic cubism where the
roof, that horizontal roof there,

with the [unintelligible]
and the gold's in it,

kind of slips down if you follow the color
into another golden side of the roof.

There's no real distinction
there and space.

Also the way that you get sort of
modeling with some black outlining,

very much, again, analytic cubism.

Dr. Zucker: That kind of
eliding of one form to another

is something that's seen as a
key characteristic of Cézanne
and is often referred to,

in his work, as passage and
the way in which it opens up
the geometry of that structure.

We were talking a moment ago
about the nature of surface and
the presence of surface here.

It's not just from the brush stroke,
it's not just from the overall color,

but it's also from the arbitrary,
look at the green brush
strokes on the center left,

or look at the beige brush
stroke that's in the upper right,

these are reminders that we're
looking at a two dimensional
surface, this refusal of space.

Dr. Harris: It almost feels a
little bit like, to me, that's
Braque's lesson from fauvism,

those touches of paint that somehow can be
separate from what he's representing, too.

Dr. Zucker: Right, but here
color is not the vehicle.

Dr. Harris: It's true, there's
these random strokes of paint.

Dr. Zucker: The whole
thing feels so rough ...

Dr. Harris: And unfinished in a way that
Cézanne often always feels unfinished.

Dr. Zucker: This is an exploration,
in no way meant to be a finished
thing so much as a step towards.

Dr. Harris: And a working through
of Cézanne after his death.

(piano playing)