Georges Braque. French painter.
He was born in Argenteuil. At Le Havre, from
1889, he worked as apprentice to his father, a
house painter. He moved to Paris in 1900 and
then studied at the free Academic Humbert
(1902-4). In 1905 he was deeply impressed by
the room of Fauve paintings at the Salon
d'Automne (including Matisse, Derain and Braque's
friends from Le Havre, b> Friesz and Dufy). The
landscapes that Braque painted (1906-7) at Antwerp
(e.g. Harbour Scene, Antwerp, 1906), L'Estaque
and Le Ciotat are in freely broken strokes of
strong colour. Braque considered these his 1st creative
works.
In 1907, like so many of his generation, he
was overwhelmed by the Cezanne Memorial
Exhibition at the Salon d'Automne and this revelation was followed by his meeting with
Picasso and the disconcerting distortions of the
Demoiselles d'Avignon. Braque's ruthlessly simplified
sombre-coloured landscapes and figures, e.g.
Nude (1907-8), of the next 2 years show the
extent of his change of direction and prepare the
way for the development of Cubism. Braque is credited with the introduction into Cubist painting
of typography (in Le Portugais, 1911) and of
the
decorator's techniques of wood-graining and
marbling, but Cubism was
essentially the
product of a remarkable partnership with Picasso
('marriage' was Picasso's word) which was
broken by the war and Braque's call up in 1914.
Cubism established above all the self-sufficient
existence of the work of art, independent of
reality, that was implicit in Cezanne's late landscapes. In looking beyond the superficial appearance of their subjects, Picasso
and Braque created a
precedent which has contributed in one way or
another to most subsequent developments in
European painting and sculpture, both figurative
and abstract.
Seriously injured in 1915, Braque returned
to Paris
in 1917 where, apart from summers at
Varengeville, he spent the rest of his life. His earliest post-war paintings returned to synthetic
Cubism with a stronger palette; La Musicienne
(1917-18).
From 1920, although still related to his Cubist
experience in their formal improvisation, his
paintings are less obviously disciplined. The
qualities which distinguished his Cubist paintings from Picasso's - his fluent painterliness and
his natural ability as a rich but subtle colourist - predominate in a work like Guitar and Jug (1927).
The still-life remained his principal theme from
the Gueridon series (1927-30) to the
climactic
Atelier series (1949-55) in which the scope of the
still-life extends to include the studio, the artist,
his model and even the painting itself. The
mysterious presence of the bird in flight is gently
evocative in this as in other works by Braque, and the
mood of his whole oeuvre - apart fromm his short-lived excursion into Surrealism in the early 1930s - is serene and harmonious.
Source: The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists (World of Art)
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