Mehlman on Braque
Jeffrey Mehlman will be giving a lecture on Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life at the Kemper Art Gallery, Washington University in Saint Louis. His lecture considers “how Georges Braque’s status as beautiful loser in his ongoing competition with Picasso meshed with France’s stunning defeat in World War II to elevate France’s premier Cubist to the rank of favorite painter of the poets of the Resistance. Everything begins with an epiphany in yellow visited on Jean Paulhan, the éminence grise of French letters, in wartime Paris and triggers a series of developments that delve deep into the history of French poetry and into French history itself during one of the most vexed periods of the twentieth century.”