Georges Braque
born May 13, 1882, Argenteuil, France
died August 31, 1963, Paris
French painter, one of the important revolutionaries of 20th-century art
who, together with Pablo Picasso, developed Cubism. His paintings consist
primarily of still lifes that are remarkable for their robust
construction, low-key colour harmonies, and serene, meditative quality.
Early life
Braque was born just seven months after Picasso, in a small community on
the Seine near Paris that was one of the centres of the Impressionist
movement in the 1870s. His father and grandfather, both amateur artists,
were the owners of a prosperous house-painting firm. In 1890 the family
moved to Le Havre, which had also been, in the time of the seascapist
Eugène Boudin and the young Claude Monet, an early centre of
Impressionism. The boy attended the local public school, accompanied his
father on painting expeditions, and developed an interest in sports,
including boxing, that gave him, as an adult, the look of a professional
athlete. He also learned to play the flute.
At 15 Braque enrolled in an evening course at the Le Havre Academy of Fine
Arts. He left school at 17 for a year of apprenticeship as a house painter
and interior decorator, first in Le Havre and then in Paris; during that
period he picked up his solid, professional handling of materials and
knowledge of the artisan's tricks—the imitation of wood grain, for
instance—that he would frequently utilize in his Cubist pictures. After a
year of military service he decided, with the help of an allowance from
his family, to become an artist. Between 1902 and 1904 he studied at a
Paris private academy and, very briefly, at the École des Beaux-Arts. In
hisfree hours he frequented the Louvre, where he admired especially
Egyptian and Archaic Greek works.
Braque's early paintings reveal, as might be expected from achildhood
spent in Normandy, the influence of the Impressionists, in particular that
of Monet and of Camille Pissarro. A little later he experienced a
revelation as he studied the firm structures and union of colour and tonal
values in the work of Paul Cézanne. Braque can be said to have begun to
find his way in 1905, when he visited the ParisSalon d'Automne and saw the
violent explosion of arbitrary colour in the room occupied by the
paintings of the group nicknamed Les Fauves (“Wild Beasts”). During the
next two years he became a convinced, if rather prudent and
tradition-minded, Fauvist, working for a while at Antwerp, Belgium, and
then on the French Mediterranean coast near Marseille, at L'Estaque and La
Ciotat.
In the spring of 1907 Braque exhibited six paintings at the Paris Salon
des Indépendants and sold them all. Later that year he signed a contract
with a dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who had recently opened a small
Paris gallery destined to play an important role in the history of modern
art. Kahnweiler introduced him to the avant-garde poet and critic
Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced him to Picasso. Braque was
at first disconcerted by Picasso's recentwork Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(1907). “Listen,” he is reported to have said, “in spite of your
explanations your painting looks as if you wanted to make us eat tow, or
drink gasoline and spit fire.” Despite these reservations, Braque painted
his Large Nude (1908), a somewhat less-radical take on Picasso's use of
distorted planes and shallow space. The two artists became close friends,
and within a few months they were engaged in the unprecedented process of
mutual influence from which Cubism emerged.
Cubism
It is impossible to say which of the two was the principal inventor of the
revolutionary new style, for at the height of their collaboration they
exchanged ideas almost daily. Picasso provided, with his proto-Cubist
Demoiselles, the initial liberating shock. But it was Braque, largely
because of his admiration for Cézanne, who provided much of the early
tendency toward geometric forms. During the summer of 1908, in southern
France, he painted a series of radically innovative canvases, of which the
most celebrated is Housesat L'Estaque. These works reflect the influence
of Braque's idol, Cézanne; this influence is seen most obviously in the
fact that L'Estaque was a favourite painting site for Cézanne,but also in
the fact that Braque emulated the older painter's use of colourful, tilted
planes and his reduction of form to geometric, often cylindrical, shapes.
Braque's works abstracted the landscape beyond the work of Cézanne,
however. The slab volumes, sober colouring, and warped perspective in his
paintings from this period are typical of the first part of what has been
called the Analytical phase of Cubism. After these radical works were
rejected by the Salon d'Automne, that fall Braque had a show at
Kahnweiler'sgallery and provoked a remark about “cubes” from the Paris
critic Louis Vauxcelles that soon blossomed into a stylistic label.
Starting in 1911 Braque—now teamed, as he said later, with Picasso as if
they were roped alpinists—reached the high point of Analytical Cubism. The
works Braque and Picasso created during these years are practically
interchangeable. The artists broke down planes and eliminated traditional
perspectival space, which resulted in crowded canvases of subjects
depicted so broken apart that they were nearly impossible to perceive.
This formal breakdown of forms and space, coupled with a shockingly
subdued palette, created a nearly abstract, difficult art unlike anything
seen before in the history of painting. Braque's Man with a Guitar is an
example: the colours are brown, gray, and green, the pictorial space is
almost flat, viewpoints and light sources are multiplied, contours are
broken, volumes are often transparent, and facets are turned into
apparently illogical simultaneous views. While many of the tendencies of
Analytical Cubism veered toward abstraction, an equally powerful
undercurrent utilized figuration. For example, in Violin and Palette
(1909), Braque painted a trompe l'oeil nail in the midst of the
near-abstract planes. In 1911, he stenciledletters into The Portuguese.
In 1912 Picasso and Braque entered Synthetic Cubism, the phase in which
subject matter became more central as the artists moved their forms out of
the confusion of contrasting planes. In 1912 Braque created what is
generally considered the first papier collé by attaching three pieces of
wallpaper to the drawing Fruit Dish and Glass. He also began to introduce
sand and sawdust onto his canvases. This work significantly strengthened
the idea, full of consequences for the future of art, that a picture is
not an illusionistic representation but rather an autonomous object.
During the early part of the Cubist adventure, Braque had a studio in
Montmartre but often worked elsewhere: in 1909 at La Roche-Guyon, on the
Seine, west of Paris; in 1910 back at L'Estaque; and in 1911 at Céret, a
village on the Mediterranean side of the foothills of the Pyrenees. In
1912 he married Marcelle Lapré and rented a house at Sorgues, a small town
in the Rhône valley near Avignon. With the outbreak of World War I, he
entered the army as an infantry sergeant and served with distinction,
being decorated twice in 1914 for bravery. In 1915 he suffered a serious
head wound, which was followed by a trepanation, several monthsin the
hospital, and a long period of convalescence at home in Sorgues. During
this period he added to the aphorisms he had been in the habit of
scribbling on the margins of his drawings, and in 1917 a collection of
these sayings, put together by his friend the poet Pierre Reverdy, was
publishedin the review Nord–Sud as “Thoughts and Reflections on Painting.”
Even a brief sampling can suggest the quality, at once poetic and
rational, of Braque's mind and the sort of thinking that lay behind
Cubism:
New means, new subjects. . . . The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal
fact, but to constitute a pictorial fact. . . . To work from nature is to
improvise. . . . The senses deform, the mind forms. . . . I love the rule
that corrects emotion.
Released from further military service, the artist rejoined the Cubist
movement in 1917, which was then still in its Synthetic phase. He and
Picasso would never work together again, however. In 1917–18 Braque
painted, partly under the influence of his friend Juan Gris, a
Spanish-born Cubist master whose paintings were strongly Synthetic Cubist,
the geometric, strongly coloured, nearly abstract Woman Musician and some
still lifes in a similar manner. Rapidly, however, he moved away from
austere geometry toward forms softened by looser drawing and freer
brushwork, as seen in Still Life with Playing Cards (1919). From that
point onward his style ceased to evolve in the methodical way it had
during the successive phases of Cubism; it became a series of personal
variations on the stylistic heritage of the eventful years before World
War I.
International acclaim
By the 1920s Braque was a prosperous, established modern master and a part
of the well-to-do, cultured circles of postwar French society. Working
again much of the time in Paris, he transferred his studio from Montmartre
to Montparnasse in 1922 and three years later moved into a new Left Bank
house designed for him by a modern-minded architect, Auguste Perret. In
1923 and again in 1925 he had commissions from Sergey Diaghilev, the great
ballet impresario, for the design of stage sets. In 1930 he acquired a
country residence at Varengeville, a group of hamlets on the Normandy
coast near Dieppe. His painting during these years can be most easily
classified, given its stylistic variety, on the basis of subject matter.
From 1922 to about 1926 he did a series of canephores, pagan-looking women
carrying fruit. Overlapping this group in time is a series of cheminées,
fireplace mantelpieces laden with fruit and sometimes a guitar. By 1928 he
created a series of gueridons, pedestal tables holding the objects
previously assigned to mantelpieces.
In 1931 Braque undertook a new medium of expression: white drawings,
incised on plaster plaques painted black, reminiscent of ancient Greek
pottery designs. Later in the 1930s he began a series of figure
paintings—first-rate examples are Le Duo and The Painter and His Model—and
in 1937 he won the Carnegie Prize. During World War II he produced a
collection of small, generally flat, decorative pieces of sculpture, in a
style recalling again ancient Greece and centring on vaguely mythological
themes.
After the war Braque resumed his practice of executing a number of
paintings on a single subject: first a series of billiard tables, then one
of studio interiors, and then one of large, lumbering birds that seem
charged with some forgotten archaic symbolism. During the last years of
his life Braque was honoured with important retrospective exhibitions
throughout the world, and in December 1961 he became the first living
artist to have his works exhibited in the Louvre.
Roy Donald McMullen
