Georges Braque Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early life and training
Georges Braque was born in 1882 in Argenteuil, near Paris, and grew up in the port city of Le Havre. His father and grandfather were house painters and decorators, and he began as an apprentice in that trade. From them he learned practical craft methods such as marbling, wood graining, and a sensitivity to the surface of materials that would later become important in his painting. As a young man he studied drawing in Le Havre alongside Othon Friesz, and then moved to Paris, where he attended the Academie Humbert. In Paris he absorbed the museum collections and the ferment of the salons, encountering the daring colorism of Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, and the still-potent influence of Paul Cezanne.

Fauvism and the impact of Cezanne
Braque first exhibited as part of the Fauvist generation, painting luminous landscapes and seaside scenes with high-keyed color and loose, rhythmic brushwork. The crucial turning point came in 1907, when a posthumous retrospective of Cezanne in Paris revealed to him a new approach to structure. Instead of treating nature as a site for pure color, he began to simplify forms into sturdy volumes and to organize space through shifting, interlocking planes. In 1908 he painted a series of landscapes at L Estaques, breaking houses and trees into faceted blocks and restricting his palette. These pictures, at once sober and experimental, signaled his move beyond Fauvism toward a new pictorial language.

Collaboration with Picasso and the formation of Cubism
Introduced within the circle of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, Braque met Pablo Picasso in 1907, not long after Picasso had painted Les Demoiselles d Avignon. From 1908 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Braque and Picasso worked in close dialogue, almost daily, testing and answering each other s ideas. Together they developed what came to be called Analytic Cubism: a disciplined, largely monochrome style that dissected objects and space into small planes, showing multiple viewpoints at once. The subjects were humble and intimate, often still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pipes, and newspapers. Braque brought to this shared enterprise a special attention to the tactile presence of things. He pioneered the use of stenciled letters and numbers, introduced sand and other additives to give paint a granular body, and in 1912 invented papier colle, adhering cut and printed papers to the surface so that illusion and reality would exchange roles. While they worked independently, the mutual stimulus between Braque and Picasso was extraordinary, and their conversations attracted other artists to the Cubist orbit, including Juan Gris and, in parallel ways, Fernand Leger.

War, injury, and renewal
In 1914 Braque entered military service. In 1915 he was severely wounded in combat and underwent a long recovery, including a period of temporary blindness. The experience separated him from Picasso and ended the intense prewar collaboration, though both artists remained linked in the public mind. When Braque returned to painting, he reintroduced color more freely and sought clarity and balance within the Cubist idiom. He exhibited with dealers who supported the movement through the difficult postwar years, first with Leonce Rosenberg and later with Paul Rosenberg, and received the continuing advocacy of Apollinaire s followers. The still life became his principal field of invention: guitars and mandolins share table space with pitchers, fruit, and folded newspapers, objects balanced on tilted planes and lit by a cool, inward light. He also designed stage sets and explored sculpture and relief, extending the Cubist sensibility into three dimensions.

Between the wars: still lifes, interiors, and the studio
Through the 1920s and 1930s Braque refined a personal classicism. He developed interiors in which a few motifs repeat with meditative variations: a table edge, a compote, a jug, sheet music, a palette or easel. The pictures invite slow looking; he orchestrates textures with a decorator s memory of wood grain and stone, a painter s patience with muted harmonies, and a builder s sense of weight. Relationships with friends and colleagues remained important. Friesz continued to be a presence from early days; Juan Gris, younger and brilliant, pressed Cubism in crystalline directions before his early death; Picasso s example remained a productive foil even as their paths diverged. Dealers such as Kahnweiler and the Rosenbergs placed Braque s paintings before collectors in Paris, London, and beyond, consolidating his reputation as not merely Picasso s counterpart but as an artist with a distinct poetic register.

War years and late work
Braque remained in France during the Second World War, working quietly. The still lifes of this period grow darker and more contemplative, as if heavy air and silence had entered the studio. After the war he embarked on the Studio or Ateliers series, large canvases that gather earlier motifs into deep, resonant spaces, and he developed a spare, emblematic bird motif that would recur across paintings, prints, and sculpture. He maintained a home and studio in Varengeville-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, and designed stained-glass windows for the local church there, binding his art to the place where he often sought calm. In 1953 he painted a ceiling for a room in the Louvre, The Birds, becoming the first living artist to receive a commission of that kind from the museum. He also worked closely with master printmakers, producing etchings and lithographs that extended his themes for a wider audience and collaborating with poets such as Pierre Reverdy and Rene Char on illustrated books.

Methods, temperament, and legacy
Compared with Picasso s extroversion, Braque was private and methodical, yet steadfastly experimental. He valued craft, the resistance of materials, and the intelligence of the hand. The decorator s training of his youth never left him; it sustained his love of imitation wood, trompe l oeil textures, and the subtle interplay of the made and the represented. His Cubism, more reticent than Picasso s, explored nuance and continuity rather than rupture, and this gave his still lifes a particular gravity. By insisting that invention could be modest, local, and cumulative, he opened paths for later painters to reexamine the ordinary. He influenced contemporaries like Gris and Henri Laurens, and, through collage and constructed surface, he helped shape modern art far beyond painting, affecting graphic design, sculpture, and the way artists think about the picture as an object. Braque died in 1963 in Paris and was buried at Varengeville-sur-Mer, closing a life that began in the workshop and ended with honors from the country whose modern art he helped to redefine.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Georges, under the main topics: Truth - Art - Poetry.

Other people realated to Georges: Pablo Picasso (Artist), Gertrude Stein (Author), Hans Hofmann (Artist), Yves Saint Laurent (Designer), Maurice de Vlaminck (Artist), Raoul Dufy (Artist)