Georges Braque

13.05.1882 Argenteuil-sur-Seine - 31.08.1963 Paris

Art history: Cubism

Short information:

Georges Braque was a French painter and sculptor, and with Pablo Picasso one of the inventors of cubism. Active until the end of his life, Braque produced an oeuvre that includes sculpture, graphics, book illustration, and decorative art.

Biography of Georges Braque

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather.[citation needed] But he also studied painting in the evenings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in le Havre from about 1897 to 1899.

He apprenticed in Paris under a master decorator and was awarded his certificate of craftmanship in 1901. The following year he attended the Academie Humbert and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.

His early work was impressionistic, however he was impressed by the bold style of work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905 and soon changed to a Fauvist style. They used brilliant colours and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense emotional response. The Fauves included, among others, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain. Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Orthon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint.

In 1907, Braque successfully exhibited works in the Fauve style in the Salon des Ind?pendants. The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he came under the strong influence of the Paul C?zanne, whose works were widely exhibited in Paris. Braque's paintings began to evidence his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. Beginning in 1909, Braque worked closely with Pablo Picasso to develop the style known as Cubism. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and papier coll?. Their collaboration continued until 1914 when Braque left Paris to fight in the First World War.

Braque was injured in the First World War, after which he moved away from the harsher abstraction of cubism, towards the hermetic and synthetic forms — the most abstract forms of cubism.