1974 Georges Braque Collotype "Birds in Flight"

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Original collotype print after the earlier Georges Braque etching, from the limited edition portfolio "Twenty Four Masterpieces of Graphic Art". … Read more Original collotype print after the earlier Georges Braque etching, from the limited edition portfolio "Twenty Four Masterpieces of Graphic Art". Printed and published by Triton Press, Inc., New York in 1974. Sheet size: 17 x 14 inches; print size: 7-1/4 x 13-1/2 inches. Initialed in plate lower right, on Brandywine Cover paper. Shown on a black background. Mint condition new old stock from our immaculate copy of "Twenty Four Masterpieces of Graphic Art".

Collotype is a printing process invented in the mid-19th century famous for producing extremely fine detail and rich tonal gradation, using photograph negatives to create printing plates. Widely used for art books, postcards, and fine art reproductions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, today collotype is commercially uncommon, but still practiced by a few master printers. Collotype prints are admired by photographers, printmakers, and collectors for its unmatched subtlety.

All through his long and active life, Georges Braque was experimenting with graphic media. His early training as a house painter developed in him a love of textures; more often than any of his colleagues he has adventured with unconventional surfaces, applying varnish and sometimes grains of sand, as in the original of this print, to gain unusual effects. The flight of birds has become for him a kind of mystic symbol and is an ever-recurring motif in many of his etchings and lithographs. This work of his later years is typical of the simplification of idea and statement which he has sought so constantly. See less