Looking at painting in occupied Paris: Georges Braque’s spectators

Abstract

Georges Braque worked in his Paris studio throughout the Occupation, painting interior scenes that seemed largely unresponsive to the historical events surrounding him. Viewers of his painting, however, brought diverse assumptions about the historical moment to their written accounts of his painting. Braque defined his painting as a process that left the domain of ideas behind, in order to discover a pictorial space of metamorphosis. But viewers, no doubt because of their own historical or aesthetic understanding, may or may not have taken the paintings’ cues about how to look. This article discusses the forms of spectatorship as evidenced in the textual descriptions of Braque’s work by writers, Resisters, German officers or Nazi sympathisers, and argues that these accounts of viewing painting resituate the artwork in the historical moment that surrounds the painter’s studio.