Trees at L'Estaque

L'Estaque, summer 1908

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 828

A November 1908 display of Braque’s work at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Parisian gallery is considered the first Cubist exhibition. The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection contains two landscapes from this historic debut: The Terrace at the Hôtel Mistral (1907) and this work. Created one year apart, they chart Braque’s stylistic evolution toward a reverse perspectival space, wherein highly sculptural forms push outward rather than recede into depth. Light and shade are no longer used to model objects naturalistically. At far left is a cylinder that represents a tree trunk and behind it is a cube, which may indicate a rock or a building farther in the distance. Landscapes such as this one were misunderstood and criticized by Braque’s peers as being “full of little cubes,” leading to the use of the name “Cubism” for this new artistic approach.