Georges Braque - Si je mourais là-bas

Georges Braque

Si je mourais lĂ -bas

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Georges Braque

Si je mourais lĂ -bas

Woodcuts, 1962

goldmark July 2015

1 43 x 31.5 cm £1450

Georges Braque

Si je mourais là-bas

Published in 1962, just a year before Braque passed away, Si je mourais là-bas (‘If I die over there’) is a set of woodcuts to accompany poems from Apollinaire’s Poèmes à Lou which Braque himself selected and edited.

Braque had been a close friend of Apollinaire’s and said of him that he was a great poet and a man to whom I was deeply attached.

The book was originally inscribed with a small dedication: This book commemorates the eightieth birthday of the artist, the poet’s comrade in the trenches, referring back to the time both men had served, though at different times, in the First World War. At times figurative, at others abstract, the feeling behind the images and the nature of their production seems like one of nostalgia or of reminiscence, but the woodcuts themselves, in their clarity and simple composition are immediate and of the present.

Braque wrote in his diaries that the painter must not try to reconstruct anecdotes, but to construct a pictorial fact and that it is that which cannot be explained which is most important in art. This is perhaps what we have in Si je mourais là-bas: seemingly disparate or unrelated moments and images (a bowl of fruit; a woman’s head; black, bird-like forms), ‘pictorial facts’ which do not try and explain those past, war- and post war-time experiences shared between Braque and Apollinaire but simply connect us to what must have been an intensely personal artistic venture.

woodcuts, 1962, ed 180

each print will be accompanied by a copy of the signed justification page.

phone 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

4 | Georges Braque

2 15 x 16.5 cm £450

Si je mourais là-bas | 5

3 42.5 x 31 cm £1450

6 | Georges Braque

4 41 x 27.5 cm £1450

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 7

5 13 x 20 cm ÂŁ550

phone 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

8 | Georges Braque

6 39 x 28 cm £950

Si je mourais là-bas | 9

7 40 x 31.5 cm £1450

10 | Georges Braque

8 30 x 29.5 cm £950

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 11

9 20 x 31 cm ÂŁ950

phone 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

12 | Georges Braque

10 42 x 34 cm £950

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 13

11 19.5 x 27 cm ÂŁ950

phone 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

14 | Georges Braque

12 33.5 x 33 cm £650

We also have proof copies of the following three woodcuts from the same suite.

16 | Georges Braque

13 proof, 38 x 63 cm with centre fold ÂŁ1450

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 17

18 | Georges Braque

14 proof, 38 x 63 cm £1750

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 19

20 | Georges Braque

15 colour variant on grey paper, 25 x 24.5 cm ÂŁ650

Si je mourais lĂ -bas | 22

22 | Georges Braque

The painter thinks

in forms and colours; his object is poetry.

phone 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com

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