Braque, Georges - Olive Tree near L'Estaque (1906)

The Neon Ghost of L'Estaque

Georges Braque did not paint a tree. He painted a loud scream in neon and violet. By 1906, he was done with the way things actually looked. He was tired of the grey sludge of reality and the stuffy rules of the Academy. He went to L'Estaque and set the landscape on fire with a Fauvist palette. It was a brief obsession but it was a bright one.

The colors are wrong on purpose. The trunk is a bruised purple and the ground is a fever dream of yellow and orange. This fifty by sixty-one centimeter canvas was his way of breaking the tyranny of the eye. He used unnatural colors to signal a total divorce from the facts of the physical world. He traded traditional perspective for rhythmic curves and bold lines. He traded depth for raw emotion. When he hung this at the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, the public didn’t know whether to look away or go blind.

The painting survived the critics but it couldn’t survive the thieves. In 2010, someone walked into a Paris museum and cut this work right out of its frame. They took the olive tree and vanished into the night. A strange fate for a work meant to liberate the soul. One moment it’s a masterclass in French radicalism. The next, it’s a rolled-up piece of fabric in a dark basement. Braque wanted to escape the mundane. He probably didn’t want the painting to escape the building entirely. It remains a ghost of a revolution that started with a brush and ended with a blade.

References

Braque, Georges. Olive Tree near L'Estaque. 1906. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Cousins, Judith. Georges Braque. New York. Museum of Modern Art. 1989.

Golding, John. Fauvism and its Influence. London. Thames and Hudson. 1980.

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