Georges Braque
1882 - 1963
Georges Braque was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as cubism.
Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine in France. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator as his father and grandfather were, but he also studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. He attended the Académie Humbert, in Paris, where he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.
His earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905 Braque adopted a Fauvist style. Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style.
After his successfully exhibited works in the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants in May 1907, Braque began a slow evolution in style as he came under the strong influence of Paul Cézanne.
Braque's paintings of 1908-1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He studied the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions. Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.
Beginning in 1909, he began to work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a similar approach to painting. The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques". He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use. The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.
Picasso and Braque worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army. He was severely wounded in the war, and when he resumed his artistic career in 1917 he moved away from the harsher abstraction of cubism.
He developed a more personal style, characterized by brilliant color and textured surfaces and the reappearance of the human figure. During his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris. Braque died August 31, 1963, in Paris.
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