Oil on paper laid onto canvas, circa 1957-58. 455x645; 18x21 1/2 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Ex-collection Ira Haupt, New York; and Walter Annenberg, New York.
Exhibited "Georges Braque, 1882–1963: An American Tribute. The Late Years (1940–63) and The Sculpture," M. Knoedler and Co., Inc., New York, April 7-May 2, 1964, no. 31.
As early as 1929 Georges Braque explored avian imagery in his illustrations for Hesiod's Théogonie (see lot 516), a series of Greek myths on the origin of the cosmos and the gods who shaped the world. The subject of birth and death preoccupied Braque for much of his career, especially after suffering serious injuries in World War I and his following two year convalescence. By 1939, Braque was expressing vanitas ideas in paint, specifically in the form of the bird: in his Atelier series he included a star-shaped embryonic bird on canvas on a cruciform easel. These apercus did not come to full fruition until the 1950s when Braque explored the form, shape and color of the bird more extensively in both his prints and paintings.
In the summer of 1955 Braque visited the bird sanctuary in Camargue where the saline marshes in the delta of the Rhine provide rich plant food for exotic birds; this stimulated his imagination for birds or at least confirmed his fascination for them. The present work reveals Braque's experimentation with different materials and the spatial relationships between various compositional parts. These certainly evolved from his Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), that he and his close friend Picasso emphasized in the flatness of the picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical "reality" of the explored forms and materials. The impasto of the pinks, the ruled lines and outlines of the bird in pencil on paper, and the movement of the bird and its pattern-line qualities all express the breadth of his venerable career.
