Georges Braque

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(b Argenteuil-sur-Seine, Seine-et-Oise, 13 May 1882; d Paris, 31 Aug 1963). French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most important contribution to the history of art was his role in the development of what became known as CUBISM. In this Braque's work is intertwined with that of his collaborator PABLO PICASSO, especially from 1908 to 1912. For a long time it was impossible to distinguish their respective contributions to Cubism, for example in the development of COLLAGE, while Picasso's fame and notoriety overshadowed the quiet life of Braque.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The French painter Georges Braque (1882-1967) was, with Picasso, the founder of cubism, one of the most significant movements in Western art.

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil, the son of a house-painting contractor who was an amateur artist. In 1890 the family settled in Le Havre, where Braque entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1899. He went to Paris in 1900 and worked as a house painter. From 1902 to 1904 Braque studied at the Académie Humbert. As a result of his friendship with Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, both artists from Le Havre, Braque became allied with 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.

Initial Cubist Phase, 1908-1909

By 1908 Braque had developed a great admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne, whose influence is discernible in Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908). In this protocubist painting the sensuousness and relative abandon of Braque's Fauve period have been cast aside. The houses have been reduced to simple cubes in shades of dull greens and grays. To underscore the geometrical severity, the windows and doors of the houses and details of the foliage have been eliminated. Braque and Pablo Picasso, who met at this time and were practically inseparable until 1914, precipitated the mature development of cubism.

Analytic Cubist Phase, 1909-1911

In cubist painting, planes merge and the distinctions between background and foreground and between one form and another become obliterated, as the object or figure seems to be viewed simultaneously from various angles. A masterpiece of Braque's analytic cubist period is the Man with the Guitar (1911), in which the figure of the musician, painted in somber earth colors and dissected into small fragments, in presented in a static triangular format. Details of the anatomy of the figure and the parts of the instrument seem to be discernible one moment, indiscernible the next. 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.

Synthetic Cubist Phase, 1911-1914

From 1911 on 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 in his collages he incorporated into the composition bits of real cloth or wood. Thus, in addition to the ambiguous spatial effects of his analytic phase, Braque's synthetic phase featured new ambiguities between what was real and what was created by the artist. In his Clarinet (1913), for example, pasted newspaper fragments, charcoal, chalk, and oil paint are so manipulated as to simulate an actual tabletop. The letters from the newspaper clipping function only as decorative or formal elements. 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.

Work after 1914

When World War I broke out, Braque was sent to the front and was wounded in 1915. After a long hospital confinement he began to paint again in 1917, adopting a course independent of Picasso. After 1918 Braque 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. The objects are clearly placed on a table, but their exact spatial locations are a bit vague. The forms now swell and expand and the paint is handled with a creamy richness, yet the colors are tastefully kept within the orbit of browns and grays. During the 1920s Braque liked to use the human figure, often a female nude, in conjunction with his still-life objects. His Nude (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. But 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 (1937) is a rich blend of shades of green, citrons, and purples. The woman, sitting before the elegant furnishings of the room, is rendered as a silhouette, reminiscent of the flat forms frequent in the synthetic cubist canvases.

Braque also executed some sculptures in plaster, about 50 lithographs, and etchings for Hesiod's Theogony (1931).

Further Reading

Edwin B. Mullins, The Art of Georges Braque (1968), is a comprehensive study of the artist; over half the book is devoted to Braque's work after 1920. Georges Braque: His Graphic Work, with an introduction by Werner Hofmann (1961), is the authoritative work on Braque's graphics. See also John Russell, G. Braque (1959); Jean Leymarie, Braque (1961); and the chapter on Braque in Janet Flanner, Men and Monuments (1947). Background works on cubism include John Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907-1914 (1959); Guy Habasque, Cubism (1959); and Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (1960).

Additional Sources

Zurcher, Bernard, Georges Braque, life and work, New York: Rizzoli, 1988.

Fauchereau, Serge, Braque, New York: Rizzoli, 1987.

Braque, Georges (b Argenteuil, 13 May 1882, d Paris, 31 Aug. 1963). French painter and designer. Among his ballet designs were Nijinska's Les Fâcheux (1924), and Massine's Salade (1924) and Zéphire et Flore (1925).

Braque, Georges (1882-1963). French painter. An essential figure in 20th-c. painting and one of the most important exponents of still life in Western art, Braque had assimilated the lessons of Impressionism and Fauvism when, in 1907, his discovery of Cézanne's work and of Picasso's revolutionary Les Demoiselles d'Avignon led him to initiate, along with Picasso, the Cubist revolution in painting. In addition to Apollinaire, who acclaimed his Cubist phase in Les Peintres cubistes (1913), his work has engaged some of the major poets of the century. These include Char, in Recherche de la base et du sommet (1955), Ponge, in a series of articles written between 1946 and 1971, and Saint-John Perse, for whose ‘poetic meditation’, L'Ordre des oiseaux (1962), Braque produced 12 coloured lithographs.

— James Kearns

Quotes:

"Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures."

"Out of limitations, new forms emerge"

Violin and Candlestick, Paris, spring 1910, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Georges Braque^[p] (13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as Cubism.

Contents 1 Youth 2 Fauvism 3 Cubism 4 Later work 5 Style 6 Notes 7 References 8 External links

Youth

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator, as were his father and grandfather. However, he also studied painting in the evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. He apprenticed in Paris under a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902. The following 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

His earliest works were impressionistic, but, after seeing the work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905, Braque adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense 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 in the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants. The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he came under the strong influence of Paul Cézanne, who 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 impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, leading to the advent of Cubism.

Cubism

Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect 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, appearing 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. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.

Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso, who had been developing a similar approach to painting. Pablo Picasso was influenced by both Cézanne and African tribal sculpture, while Braque was mostly interested in developing Cézanne's idea's 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.”^[1] The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907,^[2] 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 called Analytic Cubism.

A decisive moment in its development occurred during the summer of 1911^[3], 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 papier collé.

Their productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army, leaving Paris to fight in the First World War.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. 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."^[4] The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

Later work

Braque was severely wounded in the war, and when he resumed his artistic career in 1917 he moved away from the harsher abstraction of cubism. Working alone, he developed a more personal style, characterized by brilliant color and textured surfaces and—following his move to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his emphasis on structure. During his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris.

However, he nonetheless continued to work throughout the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of distinguished paintings, graphics, and sculptures, all imbued with a pervasive contemplative quality. Braque, along with Matisse, is credited for introducing Pablo Picasso to Fernand Mourlot, and most of the lithographs and book illustrations he himself created in the 1940s and '50s were produced at the Mourlot Studios. He died on 31 August 1963, in Paris. He is buried in the church cemetery in Saint-Marguerite-sur-Mer, Normandy, France. 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...”^[5] 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”.^[6] He adopted a monochromatic and neutral color palette in the belief that such a palette would work simultaneously with the form, instead of interfering with the viewer's conception of space; and would focus, rather than distract, the viewer from the subject matter of the painting.

Although Braque began his career painting landscapes, in 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 to, long ago, from landscape to still-life”^[7] 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 the still life reappeared in the 1930s.

Although, with the emergence of Surrealism, Braque began incorporating Surrealist inspired elements in his later works, such as the exploration of color use and a less abstracted rendering of objects, his still remained strongly devoted to his Cubist ideology of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. Braque's loyalty to a Cubist approach of painting long after Cubism ultimately hindered his career as a notable avant-garde artist. In relation to Picasso, who continuously innovated and reinvented his approach to painting to adapt with future avant-garde movements, such as Surrealism, Braque was considered mundane and of the past.^{[citation needed]}

Notes

[p] - The name Georges Braque is pronounced as "Zhorzh Brahk".^[8]

1. ^ Fry 1966, p. 71.
2. ^ Picasso, P., Rubin, W. S., & Fluegel, J. (1980). Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0870705288 p. 99,
3. ^ Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum
4. ^ Ernst Gombrich (1960) Art and Illusion, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media, p.12 [1]
5. ^ Mullins 1968, p. 34.
6. ^ Mullins 1968, p. 55.
7. ^ Mullins 1968, p. 41.
8. ^ "C.U.S.D. Art Masterpiece Manual", Mary Lynne Lasure, p.37, web: CUSD-artm-PDF.

References

• Fry, Edward F. (1966). "Cubism 1907-1908: An Early Eyewitness Account". Art Bulletin 48: 71–73.
• Mullins, Edwin (1968). The Art of Georges Braque. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
• Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum [2]
• Picasso, P., Rubin, W. S., & Fluegel, J. (1980). Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0870705288

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Georges Braque

• Artcyclopedia - Links to Braque's works and information
• Georges Braque works at insecula.com
• Peintures de Georges Braque (French)

v • d • e Fauvism Leaders Henri Matisse · André Derain Others Alice Bailly · Georges Braque · Charles Camoin · Kees van Dongen · Raoul Dufy · Henri Evenepoel · Othon Friesz · Henri Manguin · Albert Marquet · Jean Puy · Georges Rouault · Maurice de Vlaminck Paintings Green Stripe · Woman with a Hat Influences Paul Cezanne · Paul Gauguin · Vincent van Gogh · Gustave Moreau (teacher) · Georges Seurat · Paul Signac · Neo-impressionism · Pointillism Influenced Die Brücke · Neo-Fauvism See also Louis Vauxcelles (critic)

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Persondata
NAME	Braque, Georges.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH	13 May 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH	Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France
DATE OF DEATH	31 August 1963
PLACE OF DEATH	Paris

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