Georges Braque Paintings, Bio, Ideas

"Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented."

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"One must not imitate what one wants to create."

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"How is one to talk about color? .... Those who have eyes know just how irrelevant words are to what they see."

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"To work from nature is to improvise."

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"One must beware of an all-purpose formula that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization."

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"Art is made to disturb, science reassures."

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"[Braque was] a model of everything that is skill, serenity, and reflection."

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Summary of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque's work throughout his life focused on still lifes and means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line, and texture. While his collaboration with Pablo Picasso and their Cubist works are best known, Braque had a long painting career that continued well beyond that period.

Accomplishments

Though Braque started out as a member of the Fauves, he began developing a Cubist style after meeting Pablo Picasso. While their paintings shared many similarities in palette, style and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was "devoid of iconological commentary," and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition.
Braque sought balance and harmony in his compositions, especially through papier collés, a pasted paper collage technique that Picasso and Braque invented in 1912. Braque, however, took collage one step further by gluing cut-up advertisements into his canvases. This foreshadowed modern art movements concerned with critiquing media, such as Pop art.
Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand, and copied wood grain and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings. His depictions of still lifes are so abstract that they border on becoming patterns that express an essence of the objects viewed rather than direct representations.

Biography of Georges Braque

Although Braque and Picasso were very close for a period, the two art giants were almost polar opposites. Braque stayed married with one woman, fought in World War I, and was reserved and tall.

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Progression of Art

1908

Houses of l'Estaque

Braque's paintings made over the summer of 1908 at l'Estaque are considered the first Cubist paintings. After being rejected by the Salon d'Automne, they were fortunately exhibited that fall at Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler's Paris gallery. These simple landscape paintings showed Braque's determination to break imagery into dissected parts. The brown and green palette here also predicts a palette that Braque employed in many paintings to come.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Art, Berne

Artwork Images

1911

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on the Mantlepiece

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on the Mantlepiece is typical of Braque's subject matter, yet is unique as an early example of collage. In this painting, he stenciled the word "valse" to mean "waltz," in continuation with his interest in musical themes and instruments. "RHU" are first three letters for the French word for rum. Again using an exploded perspective, the viewer barely perceives a scroll in the lower right corner, which could allude to a human head, a violin or cello, or the mantelpiece in the title.

Oil on canvas - Tate Collection, London

Artwork Images

1910-12

Bottle and Fishes

Braque depicted both bottles and fishes throughout his entire painting career, and these objects stand as markers to differentiate his various styles. Bottle and Fishes is an excellent example of Braque's foray into Analytic Cubism, while he worked closely with Picasso. This painting has the restricted characteristic earth tone palette rendering barely perceptible objects as they disintegrate along a horizontal plane. While there are some diagonal lines, Braque's early paintings tended to work vertically or horizontally.

Oil on canvas - Tate London

Artwork Images

1913

Violin and Pipe

Collage helped Braque to realize that, "color acts simultaneously with form but has nothing to do with it,". He made collages to inspire painting compositions, but also as works themselves. In Violin and Pipe, he chooses a stringed instrument as his subject matter. Since there is no concrete evidence that this is a violin, one can understand better how Braque is studying the shapes within the object and pulling them apart to move them around, as if shuffling a deck of cards.

Paper, mixed media, pencil on paper - Georges Pompidou Center, Paris

Artwork Images

1925

Fruit on a Table-cloth with a Fruit Dish

The subject matter of this painting commemorates a banquet held in Braque's honor upon returning from the war. Picasso and Gris made headway in Synthetic Cubism, while Braque resumed the development of his own style, still Cubist, but more concentrated on color and texture. Fruit on a Table-cloth with a Fruit Dish shows a table display flattened out in the pictorial plane as Braque had done many times before, but here he replicates the texture of wood and marble, and even shades the fruit.

Oil on canvas - Georges Pompidou Center, Paris

Artwork Images

1938

Balustre et Crane

Balustre et Crane predicts a series of still lifes Braque created called Vanitas, in which objects symbolize agony or mental misery. He painted skulls repeatedly following his return from war and during the onset of World War II. In these paintings, Balustre et Crane in particular, Braque uses a bright array of colors to represent emotional reactions to the political discomfort he felt about the war.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Similar Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

Friends & Personal Connections

Movements & Ideas

Artists

Friends & Personal Connections

Ambroise Vollard
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Leonide Massine
Paul Rosenberg

Movements & Ideas

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Georges Braque

Books

articles

video clips

Books

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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artworks

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

"Georges Braque Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 05 Apr 2009. Updated and modified regularly
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Georges Braque

Summary of Georges Braque

Accomplishments

Biography of Georges Braque

Progression of Art

Houses of l'Estaque

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on the Mantlepiece

Bottle and Fishes

Violin and Pipe

Fruit on a Table-cloth with a Fruit Dish

Balustre et Crane

Similar Art

Table, Napkin, and Fruit (A Corner of the Table) (1895-1900)

Bathers by a River (1917)

The Wave (1870)

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Georges Braque

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics