Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman,
printmaker and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history
of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, and the role he played in the
development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is closely
associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist
works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque
was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.
Early life Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882
in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house
painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also
studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in
Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator
and was awarded his certificate in 1902. The next year, he attended the Académie
Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there until 1904. It was here that he
met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia. Fauvism
Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the
work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" in 1905, he
adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and
André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional
response. Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon
Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more
subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to
Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint. In May 1907, he successfully exhibited
works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants. The same year,
Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who
had died in 1906 and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in
a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne
retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the avant-garde artists
of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism.
Cubism Braque's paintings of 1908–1913
reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He
conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the
technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to
question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for
example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric
form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat
and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting
Houses at l'Estaque. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work
closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a similar proto-Cubist style
of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne,
African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested mainly in
developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works
of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter
with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of
Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.”
Braque’s essential subject is the ordinary objects he has known
practically forever. Picasso celebrates animation, while Braque celebrates
contemplation. Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between
Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were
the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907,
Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in
1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns
of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism.
A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911, when
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French
Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes
virtually impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began
to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique.
French art critic Louis Vauxcelles used the terms "bizarre cubiques" in 1908
after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes'.
The term 'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists
exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, quickly gained wide use
but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich
described Cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to
enforce one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored
canvas." The Cubist style spread quickly throughout Paris and then Europe.
The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked
closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque
enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head
injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness. He was trepanned,
and required a long period of recuperation.
The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will
never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them
anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain.
Later work Braque resumed painting in late 1916.
Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. He
developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color,
textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the
reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during
this time, maintaining his emphasis on structure. One example of this is his
1943 work Blue Guitar, which hangs in the Allen Memorial Art Museum. During
his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris.
He continued to work during the remainder of his life, producing a
considerable number of paintings, graphics, and sculptures. Braque, along
with Matisse, is credited for introducing Pablo Picasso to Fernand
Mourlot, and most of the lithographs and book illustrations he himself created
during the 1940s and '50s were produced at the Mourlot Studios. In 1962 Braque
worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of
etchings and aquatints titled L’Ordre des Oiseaux, which was accompanied by
the poet Saint-John Perse's text. Braque died on 31 August 1963 in Paris.
He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Valery in
Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy whose windows he designed. Braque's work is in
most major museums throughout the world. Style
Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty "… in terms of
volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty [he] interpret[s]
[his] subjective impression...” He described "objects shattered into
fragments… [as] a way of getting closest to the object…Fragmentation helped me to
establish space and movement in space”. He adopted a monochromatic and neutral
color palette in the belief that such a palette would emphasize the subject
matter. Although Braque began his career
painting landscapes, during 1908 he, alongside Picasso, discovered the
advantages of painting still lifes instead. Braque explained that he “…
began to concentrate on still-lifes, because in the still-life you have a
tactile, I might almost say a manual space… This answered to the hankering I
have always had to touch things and not merely see them… In tactile space you
measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you
measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me,
long ago, from landscape to still-life” A still life was also more accessible,
in relation to perspective, than landscape, and permitted the artist to
see the multiple perspectives of the object. Braque's early interest in still
lifes revived during the 1930s. During the period between the wars,
Braque exhibited a freer style of Cubism, intensifying his color use and a
looser rendering of objects. However, he still remained committed to the cubist
method of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. In contrast to Picasso,
who continuously reinvented his style of painting, producing both
representational and cubist images, and incorporating surrealist ideas into his
work, Braque continued in the Cubist style, producing luminous, other-worldly
still life and figure compositions. By the time of his death in 1963, he was
regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the School of Paris, and of modern
art. 2010 theft
On 20 May 2010, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris reported the
overnight theft of five paintings from its collection. The paintings taken were
Le pigeon aux petits pois by Pablo Picasso, La Pastorale by Henri Matisse,
L'Olivier Près de l'Estaque by Georges Braque, La Femme à l'Éventail by Amedeo
Modigliani and Nature Morte aux Chandeliers by Fernand Léger and were
valued at €100 million. A window had been smashed and CCTV footage showed a
masked man taking the paintings. Authorities believe the thief acted
alone. The man carefully removed the paintings from their frames, which he
left behind. Gallery
See also Crystal Cubism
References and sources References
Sources Fry, Edward F.. "Cubism 1907-1908: An
Early Eyewitness Account". Art Bulletin 48: 71–73.
Mullins, Edwin. The Art of Georges Braque. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Picasso, P., Rubin, W. S., & Fluegel,
J.. Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ISBN
0-87070-528-8 External links
Georges Braque at the Museum of Modern Art
Artcyclopedia - Links to Braque's works and information
Georges Braque works at insecula.com Site du ministère de la culture et de la
communication