HOUSES AT L'ESTAQUE
In Houses at L’Estaque painted in 1908, we can see the emergence of early Cubism. Inspired by Cezanne’s example, Braque has reduced nature’s variety of color into its essential and simple browns and greens (ART GALLERY NSW,[n.d].). This picture is one of the most important landscape paintings in early cubism. The artist combined “architecture&nature” in extreme reduction & abstraction. Neglect the classical central perspective and leave a number of details out. The structure is radically simplified; building-block houses rise up a hill away from a rather tubular tree. The picture depicts group of houses with several trees and hillside in L’Estaque. The representational forms are secondary to the rhythm of the composition (Britt, D.,1999)
This painting was compared with a photograph of the site taken by Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. From the comparison we can obviously notice that details have been eliminated in order to emphasize the basic geometric forms (Stokstad, M., Grayson M.S. and Addiss, S. 1995).
The houses have been arranged into a pyramid and those in a distance have been pushed closer to the foreground, therefore the viewer looks up the canvas more than into it. So to conclude the overall technique Braque used in this painting, it is very clear that he simplified and reorganized the scene. The painting attempts to translate nature complexity into a clear simplified form, to appreciate the painting as a whole that is the painting seems not so much a landscape as an arrangement of form and color meant to gratify classical taste. (artsconnected, 2009).