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Georges Braque (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. Georges Braque was born 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 serious painting in the 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 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. 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.
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. He showed this in the painting "House
at
L'estaque". 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. At
the time Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin,
Cézanne, African
tribal
masks and Iberian
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.” 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, 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,
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." The Cubist movement spread quickly
throughout Paris and Europe. 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. 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 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” 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. During
the period between the wars, Braque exhibited a looser and freer
approach to Cubism, intensifying his color use and a looser rendering
of objects. However, he still remained strongly committed to the cubist
method of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. In contrast to
Picasso, who continuously reinvented his approach to 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. |