From a lowly apprentice decorator in Le Havre, France, to a revolutionary pioneer of Cubism
alongside Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque's life was filled with triumph and tragedy.
But behind the genius of his work lies a complex and intriguing figure.
Are you ready to delve into his captivating story and enduring legacy?
Join me as I explore the life and creative vision of Georges Braque.
Georges Braque was born on 13th May, 1882, in Argenteuil, near Paris, France, to parents
Charles and Augustine.
His father who was an amateur painter and his grandfather before him, managed a house
decorating business, which is no doubt where Braque's interest in texture and the tactile
effects of paint came from.
In 1890, the family moved to Le Havre, where Braque attended the local public school, and
often accompanied his father on painting expeditions.
He developed an interest in sports, especially boxing, and also learned to play the flute.
At the age of 15, Braque enrolled in an evening art course at the École des Beaux-Arts in
Le Havre where he studied painting and learned traditional painting techniques.
In 1899, at the age of seventeen, he moved from Le Havre to Paris, accompanied by friends
and fellow art students Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy.
In Paris he completed his apprenticeship as a decorator and was awarded his certificate
of competence in 1902.
Between 1902 and 1904, with funding from his parents, he attended the Académie Humbert.
Together with fellow artist Francis Picabia he developed an interest in Impressionism,
particularly the work of Alfred Sisley.
But in 1905, he visited the Salon d’Automne in Paris and saw the violent explosion of
arbitrary colour in the room occupied by the paintings of Henri Matisse, André Derain
and others of the group nicknamed Les Fauves, the Wild Beasts.
As a consequence, Braque, and friends Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, began to move away
from Impressionist ideas and adopted the bold colour schemes and compositional structures
they had seen in Matisse’s paintings.
Although, there’s was a slightly more subdued, version of the Fauvist style.
In May 1906, Braque successfully exhibited his Fauve works in the Salon des Indépendants.
But his work was beginning to change as he came under the strong influence of Paul Cézanne.
Later in 1906, Braque travelled with Friesz to paint in Antwerp in Belgium, and to the
French Mediterranean coast near Marseille.
In 1907, Braque was introduced by Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet and writer, to
Pablo Picasso who invited him to visit his studio.
Braque was profoundly affected by the visit, especially when he saw Picasso's innovative
work - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
It soon became clear there was an immediate affinity between the two artists and an intimate
friendship and artistic camaraderie soon followed.
They collaborated closely, exchanging ideas almost daily and frequently commenting on
each other’s work.
It is impossible to say which of the two was the principal inventor of the new revolutionary
style of painting which later became known as Cubism.
It was Picasso who provided, with his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painting, the first
liberating shock.
But it was Braque, largely because of his admiration for Cézanne, who provided much
of the early tendency toward geometric forms.
Between them they developed the ideas that drove the development of this new artistic
style.
While their paintings shared many similarities at this time, in terms of their colour palette,
style, and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was "devoid of iconological
commentary" and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.
In May 1908, Braque and Picasso exhibited their Cubist paintings for the first time
at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris.
Their work received mixed reviews from critics and was denounced by some because they had
challenged conventional forms of representation, such as the use of perspective, which had
been the rule since Renaissance Art.
Others realised they had developed a new way of seeing and an art that reflected the modern
age.
During the summer of 1908 Braque created paintings near Marseilles which showed his determination
to break imagery into dissected parts.
The slab volumes, sober colouring, and warped perspective in his paintings from this period,
are typical of the first part of what is now called the Analytical phase of Cubism.
These radical works were rejected by the Salon d’Automne in 1908, but in the autumn Braque
showed his paintings at the Kahnweiler Gallery in Paris which prompted the Paris art critic
Louis Vauxcelles to make his remark about “cubes” which would give this style of
painting its name.
From 1909 onwards Braque worked closely alongside Picasso continually developing Cubism, but
Braque’s work gradually began to develop its own distinctive style, which tended to
combine elements of still life and landscape.
Whereas Picasso’s work often explored the relationship between figures and various objects,
such as guitars.
In 1911, Braque and Picasso spent the summer together in the French Pyrenees painting side
by side.
They produced works that were virtually impossible to distinguish from each other in terms of
style.
Traditional perspective had been eliminated, resulting in canvases whose subjects were
so broken apart that it was almost impossible to perceive them.
This formal breakdown of forms and space, coupled with a shockingly subdued palette,
created an almost abstract art unlike anything seen before.
This period was the pinnacle of Analytical Cubism.
In 1911 Picasso introduced Braque to the model Marcelle Lapré.
They soon fell in love and were married the following year.
Soon after they moved to the small town of Sorgues, near Avignon in south-eastern France.
It was in 1912, that Braque and Picasso developed Cubism further into what is now known as its
Synthetic stage.
It was during this year, that Braque created what is generally considered his first paper
collage by attaching three pieces of wallpaper to the drawing Fruit Dish and Glass.
Subject matter became more central, more important with less emphasis on contrasting planes.
They explored new techniques such as collage and incorporated letters, newspaper and even
playing cards into their work.
He also began to mix sand and sawdust with his paint to create textural effects on his
canvases.
These ideas began to suggest the idea that a picture is not an illusionistic representation,
but rather an autonomous object in its own right.
At the start of World War I in 1914, Braque served in the French army and was decorated
twice that year for bravery.
In 1915 he suffered a serious head wound, which required a trepanation to cure and resulted
in several months in the hospital, and a long period of convalescence at his home in Sorgues.
During his recovery, he began making notes and observations alongside his drawings.
In 1917 a collection of these notes was assembled by his friend the poet Pierre Reverdy and
published in the review Nord–Sud as “Thoughts and Reflections on Painting.”
It 1917 he was released from further military service and began painting again in the pre-war
synthetic cubist style, but he never worked with Picasso again.
The following year he began to collaborate with his friend Juan Gris, the Spanish-born
Cubist painter whose paintings were also strongly Synthetic Cubist.
But it wasn’t long before Braque began to move away from the strictures of the austere
geometry of Cubism towards looser drawing and freer brushwork, as can be seen in this
painting Still Life with Playing Cards.
From this point onwards Braque’s work ceased to evolve in the methodical way it had done
during the successive phases of Cubism before World War I. Instead, Braque’s work developed
into a series of personal interpretations based on the stylistic possibilities that
Cubism had suggested.
By the early 1920s, Braque had become a prosperous, established modern painter who moved in the
well-to-do, cultured circles of post-war French society.
He worked most of the time in Paris, in his studio in Montmartre and later in 1922, in
Montparnasse.
Also, in 1922 he had a successful solo exhibition in Paris which not only brought attention
to his own work but showcased his developments in terms of colour and collage.
From 1922 to about 1926, Braque's work became more representational.
He painted a series of paintings based around the idea of ancient Greek maidens carrying
baskets of sacred objects to be used at feasts for the gods.
Another series explored the idea of fireplaces and mantelpieces laden with fruit and sometimes
guitars.
In 1925, Braque painted "Fruit on a Tablecloth with a Fruit Dish," which commemorated a banquet
which had been held in his honour when he had returned from the war.
The painting shows a table flattened out in the pictorial plane, replicating the texture
of wood and marble with Cezanne like structure and colouring of the fruit.
Also, in 1925 Braque moved into a new house on the Left Bank in Paris designed for him
by the modern architect, Auguste Perret.
And later that year he received a commission from Serge Diaghilev, the great ballet impresario,
to design stage sets for the Ballet Russe.
In 1931, Braque received the Legion of Honour, a prestigious award from the French government,
for his contributions to art.
Later in the 1930s, he began a series of figure paintings examples being "Le Duo" and "The
Painter and His Model."
Unlike his contemporaries Picasso and Matisse, Braque had abandoned the idea of working from
a live model.
His paintings, therefore, are imaginary and the goaty bearded painter depicted in this
work bears no physical resemblance to Braque himself.
In 1937 Braque won the first prize of $1000 at the Carnegie Awards in New York for his
painting, ‘The Yellow Napkin’.
The grim events leading up to the Second World War had a profound effect on Braque and during
this period skulls often appear in his still life paintings.
Works from this time appear to exude a sense of darkness, despair, agony and misery, and
seem to make political statements.
The painting ‘Baluster and Skull’ is a fine example, where colours replicate the
complex emotions and reactions to impeding war.
Braque lived in Paris during World War II but continued exploring still life themes
with sombre colour schemes, despite the difficult conditions around him.
After the war, Braque resumed his practice of executing a series of paintings on a single
subject or theme, such as birds, landscapes, and scenes of the sea.
Between 1948-1955 he produced a series of nine canvases, entitled "Atelier" or "Studio,"
depicting imagery which sought to represent the artist's inner thoughts about particular
objects.
The bird symbol frequently appears in these and later works usually as a metaphor for
freedom and space.
The paintings often depicted a picture within a picture and were altogether more personal,
decorative, and more richly coloured than his pre-war paintings.
In 1948, he won first prize at the Venice Biennale and had his first retrospective exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949 and the Tate Gallery in London in 1956.
In 1949 he was asked to paint panels for the ceiling of the Henri II room in the prestigious
Louvre Museum in Paris.
The ceiling is very ornate and posed significant design issues for Braque, but he solved the
problem by producing designs that had a powerful simplicity using the imagery of birds painted
in basic flat colours.
In 1956, his design for a stained-glass window on the theme of the Tree of Jesse for the
church of Saint-Valery de Varengeville-sur-Mer, was installed.
That year he was also awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, one of
the most prestigious awards in the art world.
In the early 1960’s he designed three stained-glass windows and gifted them to the Chapel Saint-Dominique,
also in Varengeville.
In 1961, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, his studio was taken down and rebuilt
in its entirety in the Louvre's Mollien Gallery, a previously unheard-of honour for a living
artist.
Georges Braque died on 31st August, 1963, in his studio home on the Left Bank in Paris.
He was 81 years old.
He was buried in the graveyard of Saint-Valery de Varengeville-sur-Mer which has beautiful
views overlooking the English Channel.
Georges Braque was a quiet introvert, extremely observant, sharp, determined, and a very intelligent
man.
His contribution to art, particularly his role in the development of Cubism, was profound
as was his innovative use of materials and techniques, as well as his willingness to
challenge traditional ideas about art.
His achievements made him one of most influential artists of the 20th century.
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