The Birth of Cubism

Painted in 1909, L’église de Carrières-Saint-Denis dates from the early moments of Cubism. It is in the late landscapes of Braque’s transitional period that the bare bones of the movement truly consolidated. Now, he had advanced on Cézanne in rendering form in two dimensions, and he needed only his return to his studio in Paris and his collaboration with Picasso for full-blown Cubism to be born. Pepe Karmel has related about the period from 1909-1910, “the dialogue between Picasso and Braque seems to have been most intense.” (E. Braun and R. Rabinow, Cubism: The Leonard Lauder Collection, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, p. 43).Braque’s most important artistic…