Everything about Braque totally explained
Georges Braque (
May 13,
1882 –
August 31,
1963) was a major 20th century
French painter and
sculptor who, along with
Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as
cubism.
Youth
Georges Braque was born in
Argenteuil-sur-Seine,
France. He grew up in
Le Havre and trained to be a
house painter and decorator as his father and grandfather were, but 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
Andre 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, Braque 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 Cezanne 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. 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. 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 1907 Braque and Picasso in particular began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of neutralized color and complex patterns of faceted form, now called
Analytic Cubism. 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 didn't 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.
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.
He 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. He died
August 31 1963, in Paris.
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