Georges Braque

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Born: 1882

Died: 1963

Summary of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was a pioneer of Cubism, a revolutionary art style. Braque’s work centred on still lifes and different ways of perceiving items through colour, line, and texture throughout his life. While his Cubist paintings and cooperation with Pablo Picasso are the most well-known, Braque had a long painting career that spanned several decades.

Braque began his career as a member of the Fauves, but after meeting Pablo Picasso, he began to create a Cubist style. Despite the fact that both paintings shared many similarities in colour, technique, and subject matter, Braque said that his work was “devoid of iconological commentary,” and focused only on visual space and arrangement, unlike Picasso’s. Braque used papier collés, a pasted paper collage method created by Picasso and Braque in 1912, to achieve balance and harmony in his creations. Braque, on the other hand, pushed collage to the next level by pasting cut-out ads to his paintings. This predicted current art trends such as Pop art, which are focused with media criticism. To create tremendous degrees of dimension in his paintings, Braque stencilled letters onto them, mixed colours with sand, and imitated wood grain and marble. His still lifes are so abstract that they resemble patterns that reflect the essence of the things rather than being direct reproductions.

Childhood

Georges Braque was taught innovative painting methods from an early age. Braque’s interest in texture and tactility may have sprung from his time as a decorator with his father, who had a decorative painting business. Braque went from Argenteuil to Paris in 1899 at the age of seventeen, accompanied by pals Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy.

Early Life

The Fauvist style was used in Braque’s early works. He followed Fauvist ideas and cooperated with Henri Matisse from 1902 to 1905, after quitting his job as a decorator to pursue painting full-time. In 1906, he had his first show at the Salon des Independants, where he displayed his bright Fauvist paintings. However, a visit to Pablo Picasso’s studio in 1907, where he saw Picasso’s breakthrough piece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, had a profound impact on him. The two artists developed a close relationship and artistic camaraderie as a result of their meeting. “We would get together every single day,” Braque remarked, “to discuss and assay the ideas that were forming, as well as to compare our respective works”.

Picasso is responsible for the significant change in Braque’s painting style. Braque wanted to improve “the constructive elements in his works while foregoing the expressive excesses of Fauvism” after he grasped Picasso’s aims. Louis Vauxcelles, a French art critic, coined the name Cubism after characterising Braque’s work as “bizarreries cubiques,” or “scenes distilled into basic shapes and colours.” Braque (together with Pacasso) made significant contributions to contemporary art during this extremely productive prewar period, notably via their investigation of Cubism – through the movement’s so-called Analytic and Synthetic stages.

Mid Life

Braque and Picasso collaborated until Braque’s return from the war in 1914. Braque believed his buddy had broken their Cubist methods and norms when Picasso began to paint metaphorically (joining what is known as Interwar Classicism), and he went out on his own. He was, nevertheless, influenced by Picasso’s work, particularly in relation to papier collés, a collage method pioneered by both artists that uses solely glued paper. Musical instruments, grapes, and furniture were interspersed throughout his collages.

These were so three-dimensional that they’re credited with helping to shape Cubist sculpture. By 1918, Braque had exhausted his papier collés explorations and had reverted to still life painting.

At Braque’s first postwar solo display in 1919, viewers saw a more restricted palette. Nonetheless, he stuck to Cubist ideas of portraying objects in mathematically structured ways from several viewpoints. In this way, he remained a real Cubist for longer than Picasso, whose style, subject matter, and colour palettes were always changing. Braque was particularly concerned in demonstrating how objects appear through time in various temporal locations and visual planes. He naturally gravitated into creating sets and costumes for theatre and ballet performances throughout the 1920s as a consequence of his devotion to expressing space in various ways.

Late Life

Braque returned to landscape painting in 1929, this time employing fresh, vivid colours inspired by Picasso and Matisse. Braque then began to depict Greek heroes and goddesses in the 1930s, claiming that the subjects had been stripped of their meaning and should be regarded through a purely formal lens. These paintings were dubbed “exercises in calligraphy” by him, presumably because they focused less on figures and more on sheer line and shape. Braque began painting his Vanitas series in the second part of the 1930s, in which he contemplated death and suffering from an existential standpoint. Braque’s still life items were deeply personal to him, yet he never revealed their significance. Skulls, for example, were a popular subject for him during the start of World War II. Braque began painting lighter subjects like flowers, billiard tables, and garden chairs after World War II ended in 1944. His final series of eight paintings, each titled Atelier, or Studio, were created between 1948 and 1955 and showed images that expressed the artist’s inner ideas about each object rather than hints to the outer world. Braque painted birds often at the end of his life, as a fitting emblem of his obsession with space and movement.

In his still life works, Braque is recognised as a pioneer of Cubism who was both logical and sensual. In this way, he was a classic painter who influenced still life painters like Jim Dine and Wayne Thiebaud. Braque is also a well-known colorist, and his influence may be seen in current art among artists who use colour in comparable ways. Many modern artists, from sculptors like Jessica Stockholder to painters like Mark Bradford, utilise paper in their work to comment on society and its products, and Braque is perhaps best known for his use of collage.

Famous Art by Georges Braque

Houses of l’Estaque

1908

The paintings created by Braque at l’Estaque during the summer of 1908 are regarded the earliest Cubist works. They were luckily displayed that fall in Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery after being rejected by the Salon d’Automne. Braque’s drive to split images into dissected components was evident in his basic landscape paintings. The brown and green palette foreshadows a palette that Braque would use in many subsequent works.

Bottle and Fishes

1912

Bottles and fishes were represented by Braque throughout his whole painting career, and these things serve as distinguishing features throughout his many styles. Braque’s excursion into Analytic Cubism, while working closely with Picasso, is shown by Bottle and Fishes. The limited earth tone palette in this artwork creates barely discernible things as they dissolve down a horizontal line. Braque’s early paintings tended to work vertically or horizontally, with occasional diagonal lines.

Balustre et Crane

1938

Balustre et Crane foreshadows Braque’s Vanitas series of still lifes, in which items represent agony or mental anguish. Following his return from the war and at the outbreak of World War II, he painted skulls on a regular basis. Braque utilises a vibrant palette of hues in these works, particularly Balustre et Crane, to convey emotional reactions to the political uneasiness he had about the war.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• Georges Braque was a pioneer of Cubism, a revolutionary art style.
• Braque’s work centred on still lifes and different ways of perceiving items through colour, line, and texture throughout his life.
• While his Cubist paintings and cooperation with Pablo Picasso are the most well-known, Braque had a long painting career that spanned several decades.
• Braque began his career as a member of the Fauves, but after meeting Pablo Picasso, he began to create a Cubist style.
• Despite the fact that both paintings shared many similarities in colour, technique, and subject matter, Braque said that his work was “devoid of iconological commentary,” and focused only on visual space and arrangement, unlike Picasso’s.
• Braque used papier collés, a pasted paper collage method created by Picasso and Braque in 1912, to achieve balance and harmony in his creations.
• Braque, on the other hand, pushed collage to the next level by pasting cut-out ads to his paintings.
• This predicted current art trends such as Pop art, which are focused with media criticism.
• To create tremendous degrees of dimension in his paintings, Braque stencilled letters onto them, mixed colours with sand, and imitated wood grain and marble.
• His still lifes are so abstract that they resemble patterns that reflect the essence of the things rather than being direct reproductions.

Born: 1882

Died: 1963

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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