Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
5 - The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Summary
Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.
Georges BraqueTo become for someone else an example of the dedicated life, being secretly invoked, pictured, and placed by a stranger in a sanctum of his thoughts, so as to serve him as a witness, a judge, a father, a hallowed mentor.
Paul ValéryThe Second World War crept up on Europe, with almost Braquian slowness, during the winter of 1939-40. This was the drôle de guerre – the Phoney War – war declared but not yet battle joined. Seasoned Parisians carried their gas masks with soldierly resignation and expected the worst. They were not disappointed.
At the declaration, in September 1939, Braque was at his second home in Varengeville, near Dieppe in Normandy, coaching Joan Miró in poker-work and life. Miró took refuge there throughout the Phoney War, renting a house in the village and seeking his own version of renewal. Down the lane was the great Georges Braque. The newcomer went to call on him regularly. Miró's working notes offer glimpses of what passed between them:
The preparation of the series of large canvases for Daphnis and Chloe is very unsatisfactory; if you press on the back of them with your finger the preparatory coat comes off. Use a solvent to remove that preparation and then give the canvas a coat of white lead or casein, the preparation Braque and Balthus use … Using the lost wax process – which Braque taught me – I could make some designs that could later be made in gold, like the primitive Mexicans used to … I could start out by taking red-hot irons and applying them to the wood the way Braque and Mariette did …
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Art and War and Terror , pp. 100 - 124Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009