GEORGES BRAQUE
Argenteuil 1882
Paris 1963

BIOGRAPHY

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil on May 13, 1882. The family moves to Le Havre in 1890 where the young boy has his first encounters with paint and brushes in his father's painting business. He attends lectures at the Le Havre Art Academy as of 1899, a short time later he starts to work for a decoration painter. Georges Braque goes to Paris in 1900, and continues his apprenticeship as a decoration painter, he attends drawing classes at the school of Batignolles, followed by studying at the Académie Humbert.

Georges Braque sees works of the "Fauves" in the Salon d'Automne in 1905, which impress him so much that he takes on their bright colours in his works. He spends the fall of 1906 painting in L'Estaque, in the footsteps of Paul Cézanne, whose paintings he also admires. Together with the "Fauves", he exhibits in the Salon des Indépendants in 1907. He spends the summer and the fall of this year in L'Estaque again. It is also in 1907 that he meets Pablo Picasso, encountering his painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". A close friendship between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso begins, in their artistic co-operation and especially by closely examining the art of Paul Cézanne, they develop the Cubist style of painting. They exhibit in the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in Paris in 1908.
Braque's and Picasso's close co-operation lasts until 1914, some works from this period of "analytic Cubism" (1909-1912) are hard to clearly ascribe to one or the other artist, their painting becomes more and more abstract. Georges Braque adds letters to his pictures, drawn labels or Trompe-l'oeil effects, a technique that is then also taken on by Picasso. The period of "synthetic Cubism" follows as of 1912, a period during which Braque makes paper collages, the "Papiers collés", which are again taken on and developed by Picasso. They integrate other materials such as paper, wood, or sand into their paintings.
clarinet-and-bottle-of-rum-on-a-mantelpiece-1911 serves in World War I, he suffers a severe head injury followed by a long period of convalescence. He only picks up painting again as of 1917, making works that he will only present in public as of 1923. He becomes detached from Cubism, his works undergoing permanent changes over the following time.
Besides paintings, Braque also creates an extensive graphic oeuvre as of 1912, making etchings, also in colors, lithographs and woodcuts. As of 1939 he begins to deal intensively with sculpting and pottery. He makes the "Stuio pictures" as of 1949.
clarinet-and-bottle-of-rum-on-a-mantelpiece-1911 dies in Paris on August 31, 1963.

Georges Braque was a 20th century French painter best known for inventing Cubism with Pablo Picasso.
Georges Braque was a 20th century French painter who invented Cubism with Pablo Picasso. Along with Cubism, Braque used the styles of Impressionism, Fauvism and collage, and even staged designs for the Ballet Russes. Through his career, his style changed to portray somber subjects during wartime and lighter, freer themes in between. He never strayed far from Cubism, as there were always aspects of it in his works. Braque died on August 31, 1963, in Paris.
Georges Braque was a French painter born on May 13, 1882, in Argenteuil, France. He spent his childhood in Le Havre and planned to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather by becoming a house painter. From about 1897 to 1899, Braque studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in the evenings. Wanting to pursue artistic painting further, he moved to Paris and apprenticed with a master decorator before painting at the Académie Humbert from 1902 to 1904.
Braque started his art career using an Impressionistic painting style. Circa 1905, he transitioned into a Fauvist style after viewing works exhibited by the Fauves, a group that included such notable artists as Henri Matisse and André Derain. The Fauves' style incorporated bold colors and loose-form structures to emulate deep emotions.
Braque's first solo show took place in 1908 at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery. From 1909 to 1914, Braque and fellow artist Pablo Picasso collaborated to develop Cubism as well as to incorporate collage elements and papier collé (pasted paper) into their pieces.
Braque's style changed after World War I, when his art became less structured and planned. A successful exhibition in 1922 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris garnered him much acclaim. A few years later, renowned dancer and choreographer Sergei Diaghilev asked Braque to design decor for two of his ballets at the Ballets Russes. The end of the 1920s saw another style change as Braque began painting more realistic interpretations of nature, though he never strayed far from Cubism, as there were always aspects of it in his works.
Braque started to engrave plaster in 1931, and his first significant show took place two years later at the Kunsthalle Basel. He gained international fame, winning first prize in 1937 at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.
The advent of World War II influenced Braque to paint more somber scenes. After the war, he painted lighter subjects of birds, landscapes and the sea. Braque also created lithographs, sculptures and stained-glass windows.

The close collaboration between Picasso and Braque beginning in 1909 was crucial to the style's genesis. The two artists met regularly to discuss their progress, and at times it became hard to distinguish the work of one artist from another (as they liked it). Both were living in the bohemian Montmartre section of Paris in the years before and during World War I, making their collaboration easy.
In 1912, Kahnweiler gave his first public interview on Cubism, no doubt in response to growing public interest in (and some recognition of) the movement. When World War I began, Kahnweiler, as a German, was exiled from France. During the war, Léonce Rosenberg became the main dealer for Cubist art in Paris (including those of the Salon Cubists) with his brother Paul Rosenberg serving as Picasso's dealer during the interwar years.
Though Picasso and Braque returned to Cubist forms periodically throughout their careers and there were some exhibitions of work up until 1925, the two-man movement did not last much beyond World War I.
Salon or Section d'Or Cubism

The Salon Cubists, so-called because they showed their works at public exhibits such as the Salon d'Automne, did not work closely with Picasso and Braque but were influenced by their experiments. It was through the work of the Salon Cubists that the movement became widely known to the public in the early 1910s. These artists included Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger. Metzinger and Delaunay, who had been friends at least since 1906, began collaborating with Gleizes as a result of the yearly Salon d'Automne. It was through Gleizes that they met Le Fauconnier who had published Note sur la peinture (1910) in which he praised Picasso and Braque for their "total emancipation" of painting.
These artists exhibited together at the 1911 Salon des Independants, introducing Cubism to the general public. The Independants was a non-juried exhibition where public reaction depended on how and where paintings were hung. The Cubists got control of the hanging committee from the Neo-Impressionists so that their works could be hung together in one room as a coherent school. The paintings created a stir, as Gleizes noted: "While the newspapers sounded the alarm to alert people to the danger, and while appeals were made to the public authorities to do something about it, song writers, satirists and other men of wit and spirit provoked great pleasure among the leisured classes by playing with the word 'cube', discovering that it was a very suitable vehicle for inducing laughter which, as we all know, is the principle characteristic that distinguishes man from the animals."
In addition to showing their works in large exhibitions, the Salon Cubists were also distinct from Picasso and Braque in that they often worked on a large scale, leading one art historian to coin the term 'Epic Cubism' to distinguish their work from the more intimate paintings of Picasso and Braque. While they broke apart objects and bodies into geometric forms like those of Picasso and Braque, the Salon Cubists did not challenge Renaissance conceptions of space to the same extent nor did they embrace the monochromatic color of Analytic Cubism or the collage elements of Synthetic Cubism.

At the end of 1911 Gleizes and Metzinger, who lived closely together in the Parisian suburbs, and others in the group began meeting in Puteaux, a suburb where the painter and engraver Jacques Villon and his brother, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon had their studios (leading to them sometimes being called the Puteaux group). It is likely as a result of these meetings that the main ideas for Metzinger and Gleizes' On Cubism (1912) were formalized; it was the first published statement about the style.
The next year the group also planned the launch of the Salon de la Section d'Or (1912) that would bring together the most radical currents in painting. The term Section d'Or was a name the Salon Cubists adopted to show their attachment to the golden mean, i.e. the belief in order and the importance of mathematical proportions in their works that reflected those in nature. The Section d'Or exhibit was held after the 1912 Salon d'Automne at the Galerie La Boetie. It was at this exhibit that the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire coined the term Orphism to refer to the work of Delaunay. The next year Apollinaire published Aesthetic Meditations: The Cubist Painters (1913). These many exhibits and publications were calculated to make an impact, both in Paris and abroad.
As with the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the Salon or Section d'Or group did not continue coherently after WWI, having only sporadic exhibits between 1918 and 1925.
Styles
The various stages of development in the Cubist style are based on the work of Picasso and Braque rather than on those of the Salon Cubists. The exact names and dates of the stages are debated and continually reframed to this day.
Cezannian Cubism (1908 -1909)
This early phase of the movement came in the wake of the Paul Cézanne retrospective in 1907 when many artists were reintroduced or introduced for the first time to the work of Cézanne, who had been living in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France before his death and had not exhibited in Paris for many years. Several artists who saw the retrospective were influenced by his lack of three-dimensionality, the material quality of his brushwork, and his use of uniform brushstrokes. Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908) is a good example of this type of Cubism.
Analytic Cubism (1910- 1912)
In this phase, Cubism developed in a highly systematic fashion. Later to be known as the Analytic period of the style, it was based on close observation of objects in their background contexts, often showing them from various vantage points. Picasso and Braque restricted their subject matter to the traditional genres of portraiture and still life and also limited their palette to earth tones and muted grays in order to lessen the clarity between the fragmented shapes of figures and objects. Although their works were often similar in appearance, their separate interests showed through over time. Braque tended to show objects exploding out or pulled apart into fragments, while Picasso rendered them magnetized, with attracting forces compelling elements of the pictorial space into the center of the composition. Works in this style include Braque's Violin and Palette (1909) and Picasso's Ma Jolie (1911-12).
Towards the end of this stage of Cubism, Juan Gris began to make contributions to the style: he maintained a sharp clarity to his forms, provided suggestions of a compositional grid, and introduced more color to what had been an austere, monochromatic style.
Synthetic Cubism (c. 1912 - c. 1914)
In 1912 both Picasso and Braque began to introduce foreign elements into their compositions, continuing their experiments with multiple perspectives. Picasso incorporated wall paper that imitated chair caning into Still Life with Chair-Caning (1912), thus initiating Cubist collage, and Braque began to glue newspaper to his canvases, beginning the movement's exploration of papier-colle. In part this may have resulted from the artists' growing discomfort with the radical abstraction of Analytic Cubism, though it could also be argued that these Synthetic experiments touched off an even more radical turn away from Renaissance depictions of space, and towards a more conceptual rendering of objects and figures. Picasso's experiments with sculpture are also included as part of the Synthetic Cubist style as they employ collaged elements.
Crystal Cubism (1915 -1922)
As a response to the chaos of war, there was a tendency among many French artists to pull back from radical experimentation; this inclination was not unique to Cubism. One art historian has described this stage of Cubism as the "end product of a progressive closing down of possibilities." In Léger's Three Women (1921), for example, the depicted subjects are hard-edged rather than resembling overlapping bits of low-relief sculpture; Léger also did not attempt to show objects from various angles. Crystal Cubism is associated with Salon Cubism as well as with the works of Picasso and Braque. Crystal Cubism is part of the larger trend known as a "Return to Order" that was associated with artists in the School of Paris.