Georges Braque

Georges Braque (Argenteuil, 1882 – Paris, 1963) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and sculptor, and one of the founders of Cubism together with Pablo Picasso. His work, which combines a rigorous interest in form with a strong sensitivity to colour and surface, belongs to the first half of the twentieth century and is central to understanding how painting moved away from the traditional representation of space. Although for decades he was remembered mainly alongside Picasso, his work has its own character and a more contemplative dimension.

Early training in Paris

Braque was born in Argenteuil and grew up in Le Havre, where he trained as a house painter and decorator, like his father and grandfather. In the evenings he also studied artistic painting at the school in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris he apprenticed with a decorator, earned his certificate in 1902 and, the following year, attended the Académie Humbert, where he painted until 1904. There he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia, in a milieu that was still far from the avant-garde movements to come.

From Fauvism to the shadow of Cézanne

His earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work of the group known as the Fauves, or Beasts, in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style, using brilliant colour to express an emotional response to the landscape. Working closely with Othon Friesz, who shared his hometown of Le Havre, he developed a somewhat more restrained version of the movement. In 1906 he travelled with Friesz to L'Estaque, Antwerp and back to Le Havre, and in May 1907 he showed Fauve-style works at the Salon des Indépendants.

That same year his painting began to change. The Paul Cézanne retrospective, the first large-scale museum-style showing of the artist's work in Paris, opened in autumn 1907 and greatly affected the avant-garde. Braque set about studying Cézanne's contour lines methodically and reinterpreting them. In the summer of 1908 he painted landscapes at L'Estaque, a place Cézanne had also painted, and in the following years he worked in Normandy and at La Roche-Guyon. In these canvases forms are simplified almost to geometric volumes, in what is now regarded as a pre-Cubist phase.

The birth of Cubism

From 1909 Braque worked very closely with Picasso, who was also developing a proto-Cubist painting. Picasso drew on a wide range of sources, from Gauguin to African masks and Iberian sculpture, while Braque concentrated mainly on developing Cézanne's ideas about multiple perspective. Some historians argue that his encounter with Picasso accelerated and intensified his investigation rather than fundamentally changing his thinking. Their canvases from 1908 to 1912 came to look so alike that, for years, it is hard to tell the authorship of many of these works apart.

Analytic Cubism broke objects into facets, using a restrained palette of muted tones, until they became almost unrecognisable. In the summer of 1911, in Céret in the French Pyrenees, the two artists painted side by side. In 1912 they began to experiment with collage, and Braque invented papier collé, in which pieces of pasted paper were introduced into the painted surface. That same year he also made paper sculptures. The word Cubism grew out of contemporary criticism: in 1908 the critic Louis Vauxcelles described Braque as a painter who reduced everything to geometric schemas and cubes, and in 1909 he spoke of cubic oddities.

Around 1912 a third phase, Synthetic Cubism, emerged, in which Braque, more than Picasso, pursued a more unified composition with forms integrated into the whole.

War and the return to painting

The partnership was interrupted by the First World War. Braque enlisted in the French Army, and in May 1915 he suffered a severe head wound in battle at Carency that caused temporary blindness. He underwent trepanation and needed a long recovery. Years later he described his bond with Picasso as being roped together on a mountain, a closeness that, in his words, no one would ever fully understand again.

When he resumed painting in late 1916 he worked alone and began to moderate the harsh abstraction of Cubism. His style became more personal, with intense colour, textured surfaces and, after he settled on the Normandy coast, the return of the human figure. He painted many still lifes, keeping his interest in structure, and during his convalescence he became a close friend of the Cubist painter Juan Gris.

Later years and recognition

In the 1930s Braque practised a freer, more relaxed Cubism, with more intense colour and looser handling, without giving up simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. While Picasso kept reinventing his language, Braque stayed faithful to his path and produced luminous still lifes and figure compositions. After the Second World War his work was often interrupted by illness, but he continued to paint, print and sculpt.

In 1952–53 he made The Birds, a ceiling painting for a room in the Louvre, and in 1961 he became the first living painter whose work was shown there, in a retrospective. He died in Paris on 31 August 1963, aged 81, and was given a state funeral in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre. He is buried in the churchyard of Saint-Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, whose windows he designed.

Style and legacy

Braque believed the artist experiences beauty through volume, line, mass and weight, and that the fragmentation of objects helped him establish space and movement within the picture. He adopted a monochromatic, neutral palette so that attention would fall on the subject. Although he began with landscape, around 1908 he turned to still life, which he found offered a tactile space, closer to touching things than merely seeing them at a distance.

His legacy rests on his role as co-inventor of Cubism, his introduction of collage, and a body of work that showed painting could construct space without relying on traditional illusion. Today his work is held in most of the world's major museums.