Georges Braque (1882

Georges Braque

Georges Braque was at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. His 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.

Though Braque started out as a member of the Fauves—a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others—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’s early works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905, Braque adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense emotional response.

He conducted an intensive study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, time dovodeći u pitanje najstandardnije umjetničke konvencije. In his village scenes, for example, Braque redovito smanjivao arhitektonsku strukturu do geometrijske forme slične kocki, no predočio je njezinu sjenu tako da ona izgleda i ravna i trodimenzionalna.

A decisive moment in its development occurred during the summer of 1907, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret, in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes virtually impossible—to distinguish from those of the other.

Together, Braque and Picasso developed Analytical Cubism, dissecting objects into fragmented geometric shapes and presenting multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Works like Houses at L'Estaque demonstrate this early phase, showcasing a radical departure from conventional perspective and a focus on the underlying structure of forms.

Their palette became deliberately muted, emphasizing form over color, as they sought to represent the totality of an object’s presence rather than merely its appearance.

The invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the movement’s main innovators.