Georges Braque was a French painter of the 20th century. Along with Picasso and Juan Gris, he played a prominent role in the development of Cubism.
Background
Ethnicity:
Braque's ancestors came from Haudivillers, near Compiégne, not far from Paris.
Georges Braque was born on May 13, 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise, France. He was the son of Charles Braque, a house-painting contractor who was an amateur artist, and Augustine Braque.
Education
Georges Braque was raised in Le Havre where his family settled in 1890.
He began his studies three years later at the local lycee. In 1897, Georges enrolled at the École supérieure d'art in Le Havre where he studied artistic painting for two years.
He then became an apprentice of a painter-decorator in Paris receiving his certificate in 1902. From 1902 to 1904, Braque studied at the Académie Humbert.
Career
Georges Braque's career started in 1900 when he went to Paris and worked as a house painter. As a result of his friendship with Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, both artists from Le Havre, Braque joined the Fauve movement in 1906. With Friesz, he traveled to Antwerp in 1906, to La Ciotat in 1907, and several times to L'Estaque.
Braque's Fauve period proved transitory, and his Fauve works were relatively restrained. In the Paris version of La Ciotat (1907), for example, the colors, though vivid, are not dazzling, and the brushstrokes are applied in small rectangular units rather than in the broad, quick swatches used, for example, by Maurice Vlaminck.
By 1908, Georges had developed a great admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne, whose influence is discernible in Braque's Houses at L'Estaque, painted in 1908. In this protocubist painting the sensuousness and relative abandon of Braque's Fauve period were cast aside.
A masterpiece of Braque's analytic cubist period is the Man with the Guitar painted in 1911, in which the figure of the musician painted in somber earth colors and dissected into small fragments is presented in a static triangular format.
Braque's and Picasso's paintings of 1909-1911 are especially close and in some cases virtually indistinguishable, though Braque's work is more elegant, slightly more restrained, less emotional, and less expressive.
From 1911, Georges Braque became less dependent on physical reality as the starting point for his artistic conception. Instead of showing the object in its totality, though broken into smaller fragments, he took parts of several objects and arranged them in new combinations. From this time, too, he showed an interest in simulating the textures of wood, marble, and other materials in his paintings, and incorporated bits of real cloth or wood into the composition of his collages. For example, in his Clarinet, painted in 1913, pasted newspaper fragments, charcoal, chalk, and oil paint are so manipulated as to simulate an actual tabletop. The softness of the textures and the oval curves within the rectangular frame produce a delicacy seldom found in Picasso's work of the same period.
In 1914, Braque joined the French Army where he served as Lieutenant. When the First World War broke out, Braque was sent to the front where he was wounded in 1915. After a long period of treatment in hospital, he began to paint again in 1917, adopting a course independent of Picasso. Then, the artist largely abandoned collage and the relative austerity of his synthetic cubist phase. A new richness and sensuousness of the painted surface became discernible in his work, but tempered by restraint and refinement. Although cubist devices and passages occasionally occurred, they ceased to be fundamental to Braque's conception. In the Still Life with Guitar and Fruit (1924), the individual integrity of the richly painted guitar and of the still-life elements is maintained.
During the 1920s, Braque liked to use the human figure, often a female nude, in conjunction with his still-life objects. His Nude of 1925 in Chicago displays a sensuous, monumental figure, somewhat in the manner of Pierre Auguste Renoir.
Braque continued to go his own way, unaffected by the latest changes in European painting. The harmony and containment of his art did not preclude a richness and originality of expression, which was especially evident in the 1930s. His Woman with a Mandolin of 1937 is a rich blend of shades of green, citrons, and purples. Georges Braque also executed some sculptures in plaster, about 50 lithographs, and etchings for Hesiod's Theogony (1931).
Quotations:
"Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented."
"One must not imitate what one wants to create."
"How is one to talk about color?... Those who have eyes know just how irrelevant words are to what they see."
"To work from nature is to improvise."
"One must beware of an all-purpose formula that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization."
"Art is made to disturb, science reassures."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"[Braque was] a model of everything that is skill, serenity, and reflection." Joan Miró, Spanish painter and sculptor
Interests
Artists
Paul Cézanne
Connections
In 1912, Georges Braque met Marcelle Lapre, a professional model, introduced to him by Picasso. Braque married her in 1926.
Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life
This examination of Braque's career features exquisite reproductions and incisive historical and aesthetic investigations of his work leading up to and during World War II.
2013
Georges Braque
This invaluable study brings a new clarity to Braque's art and art making.
1991
Georges Braque: A Life
A full-length portrait of the pioneering founder of Cubism places his life against a backdrop of twentieth-century art, covering such topics as his role in bringing about a revolutionary way of seeing, his creative partnership with Picasso, and his boundary-pushing artistic achievements.