Georges Braque

French painter

• Born: May 13, 1882
• Birthplace: Argenteuil, France
• Died: August 31, 1963
• Place of death: Paris, France

Braque cofounded cubism with his friend Pablo Picasso. Braque is best known, however, as a master of the still life, which constituted approximately two-thirds of his artistic output. His paintings are famous for their discipline, rationality, classical lines, and subdued colors.

Early Life

Georges Braque (zhawrzh brahk) was born into a family of decorators and “Sunday painters” in Argenteuil, France. In 1890, the family business was moved to Le Havre. Braque attended the local lycée in 1893 and by 1897 took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1899, he was apprenticed to a decorator and in 1900 sent to Paris to get a craftsman’s diploma. After completing military service in 1902, he enrolled in the Académie Humbert, where he was influenced by the Fauves. After two years at the Académie Humbert, he set up his own studio.

Few of his earliest paintings survive, yet in Ship in Harbor, Le Havre (1905), he turned from imitating Impressionism to a geometric consideration of shapes. In 1906, he allied with the Fauves and contributed seven paintings to their exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants. In the summer of 1906, he painted in Antwerp with a boyhood friend, Othon Friesz, and produced some lovely Fauvist works, for example, two brilliantly colored pieces, The Bay at Antwerp (1906) and Landscape Near Antwerp (1906), both with a linear structure. He then set out for L’Estaque on the Mediterranean, passing through Paris to see the Paul Gauguin exhibition. During the winter of 1906-1907, he captured the blinding colors of Provence. Yet his paintings from the south also show an uncharacteristic structural rhythm, patterned shapes, and a formal order, for example in L’Estaque, Road with Two Figures (1906).

When Braque returned to Paris in October of 1907, he saw the great Paul Cézanne exhibition. Cézanne’s works emphasized their creator’s famous maxim: Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, sphere, and cone. Within a few months, Cézanne’s influence replaced that of Gauguin and Henri Matisse. This influence is particularly noticeable in two of Braque’s paintings, View from the Hôtel Mistral (1907) and Houses at L’Estaque (1908), where Cézannian blues, greens, and browns replaced bright Fauvist colors, and geometrical patterns took over from pointillist and speckled and dotted areas.

In October, 1907, Braque’s dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, introduced him to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who took him to meet Pablo Picasso. Here Braque saw Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). As a result, in the winter of 1907-1908, Braque painted the large Standing Nude, with its broken and tilting planes and parallel brushstrokes. Because of Braque’s discovery of Cézanne and Picasso, he now realized that his own approach to painting would be conceptual rather than perceptual. The Fauvist colors were forever gone in favor of subdued greens, browns, blues, and grays. Also, he raised or tilted his picture’s view so as to cut out the horizon. His pictures appeared suspended and with multiple viewpoints. By 1908, he had established the grammar of cubism with its enclosed and definable spaces and still lifes done on interlocking planes. That year he painted what he called his first cubist picture, Still Life with Musical Instruments , in which the illusion of perspective has been eliminated by tilting the picture’s plane like a solid wall until there is no horizon. The picture’s curved and angular forms are rendered in ochers and greens. The picture is considered Braque’s first unquestioned masterpiece.

When Braque submitted six of his L’Estaque paintings to the Salon d’Automne, the Fauvist jury rejected them. Matisse used the derisive word “cube,” and the art critic Louis Vauxcelles borrowed this word in a review of Braque’s new style: “He despises form and reduces everything, landscapes and figures and houses, to geometrical patterns, to cubes.” Vauxcelles had unknowingly labeled the most important art movement of the twentieth century.

Life’s Work

A new pictorial language had made its appearance, one of volume, tactility, enclosed space, and interlocking planes. One can see that Braque’s lighthouses depicted on a flat plane in the painting Harbor in Normandy (1909), called “cubic oddities” by Vauxcelles, could have been salt and pepper shakers, and the picture itself is full of greens, buffs, and bluish-grays in a constructionist landscape where sea, land, and sky are fragmented and geometrical forms occur in a dense network of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

When Braque returned to Paris in the fall of 1909, his friendship with Picasso ripened, and together they developed “analytical” cubism. One of the earliest works illustrating this phase of Braque’s development is Guitar and Fruit Dish (1909). It is both the last work in Braque’s Cézannian period and the first in this phase. In this painting is the basic grammar of cubism. Objects musical instruments and fruits are seen from all different angles simultaneously. All objects are brought to the very surface of the picture by the use of tilted planes. It is a work almost entirely in buff with some soft grays and a darker shade outlining each object. There is an immense scaffolding of diagonal lines built up of parallel brushstrokes that move from dark to light, and each flat surface slightly tilts. The lighting in this picture appears to be playing from several sources at once in a neutral color scheme, or grisaille palette. For the presence of all these elements, the term “analytical cubism” was coined by a fellow cubist, Juan Gris, to describe just such a painting of fragmented images as if these images were reflected in shattered glass.

In 1910, Braque executed two paintings to emphasize his two-dimensional interpretation of space through fragmentation and the “analysis” of the resulting volumes entitled Violin and Pitcher and Violin and Palette . Each painting is a highly vertical and slender arrangement of forms suspended from the top rather than built up from the bottom. In each, the instrument has been taken apart “analytically” and, then, reassembled from rectangular or irregularly shaped pieces. The instruments actually merge into the background. A nail complete with its shadow is painted at the very top as if to emphasize that the whole hangs suspended. The brushstrokes have been sharply reduced to short stabs, and the colors no longer have specifically descriptive functions.

In 1911, Braque’s analytical phase reached high tide. It tended dangerously toward pure abstraction. For example, in such paintings as The Portuguese , almost entirely in buffs and black-grays, Braque dissociated both color from description and planes from physical volumes. Only the lettering “BAL” and some numbers save this picture from pure abstraction; there is no other way to reassemble the world except through these plain bits of reality. This painting is the twin of Picasso’s Ma Jolie of the same year. Braque, like Picasso, was not interested in any abstract ideal; rather, he was opposed to it. Braque wanted to approach the real world and, thus, took steps to avoid complete abstraction. Hence, the “hermetic” phase of analytical cubism, from which the famous The Portuguese comes, remains the closest approach to abstraction for Braque, and this phase ended in 1911.

In the new “synthetic” cubism of 1912, Braque introduced more elements of reality while simultaneously simplifying structure. Along with lettering and numbers, Braque innovated with imitated wood paneling, marbling, cutout paper, and oilcloth, and added bits of sand, metal filings, sawdust, ash, or even tobacco to his paints for greater tactility. Already in the bottom left corner of Homage to Bach (1912), the first imitated wood paneling appears, along with the lettering BACH and J. S. in the painting’s center. It is a painting that is quite emptied of space and very flat. In the same year, in Fruit Dish and Glass , Braque used separate areas for a black charcoal drawing on white and extended over the pasted areas of wallpaper. Braque now totally dissociated color from form and made it entirely independent. Braque did additional works remarkable for their simplicity, penciled outlines, and charcoal lines forming a light scaffolding with some dark cutout areas, such as Aria de Bach (1913) and Still Life with Playing Cards (1913). In the latter painting, the black edge of a table, oak panels, and cards make a first showing in cubist iconography.

In 1914, Braque served in the French army and was seriously wounded. After convalescing, he began painting again in 1917. The Musician (1917), in which both form and color are dissociated, looks like a typical Gris or Picasso of that same period. By 1919, Braque was moving away from cubism, as in Café-Bar. In this work, Braque uses the three-dimensional technique of light areas for the table and dark areas for its background. It is painted mainly in greens with some sparse white, as in the lettering for which the picture is named. The picture is also noteworthy for its heavy black outlining of objects. This picture looked forward to the 1920’s and 1930’s, especially to the gueridons (pedestal tables), with their vertically arranged objects on high stands.

Braque’s gueridon series, done from the 1920’s through the 1940’s, were paintings executed essentially in a high and narrow vertical format. They often use texture and color to enrich the sensuous tactility of the objects cluttering the high tables or mantles. In each of these paintings, the viewer’s eyes follow the vertical line upward until it can look down at the clustered objects on the table or mantel a bottle, fruit, a glass, a knife, and so forth. This double viewpoint is a quintessential Braquian technique. Braque’s first painting in this series, Le Guéridon (1921-1922), shows a very shallow room with a flow of light brightening the colors. The green table is painted in a slender vertical fashion with its top tilted toward the plane of the picture where a series of white objects lie. The pedestal is a realistic and heavy yellow tripod, resting on a marble checkered floor. The viewer’s eyes move upward from the thickish base to the musical score and the impasto-painted stringed instrument, even higher to the grapes and vase, and ever onward to a black folded screen, it would appear, just behind the table. This screen serves to amplify the curvature of various objects on the tabletop. The whole composition is surrounded by a sense of space. Part of the wall paneling recedes downward. In later paintings, Braque enlarged the interior space and used a sand and plaster mixture to obtain a grainy background, which he then covered thinly with paint applied in smooth plains so as to give the whole work the impact of a fresco.

His wartime gueridons, painted in occupied Paris, have a realistic tone and severity usually achieved by the simplicity of a few objects. His most popular wartime canvases are Black Fish (1942) and the austere Interior: The Grey Table (1942), which is also referred to as Interior with Palette. In these two magnificent paintings, the objects are now dispersed broadly across the horizontal plane of the picture. The depth of color determines each object’s distance from the viewer. Braque lays two crossed fish along the horizontal plane on a grayish plate, which rests on a black table. On the left, balancing the black fish, are two pieces of fruit, one a dull orange and the other a soft yellow. The background wall has the long horizontal lines of rectangles and, acting as a counterpoint to the fish, black pictures in gray frames. Interior: The Gray Table is distinguished by rectilinear forms and two transparent volutes superimposed on the soft browns of the composition. Likewise, there are grays and greens laid over the picture’s solid black background. In these two paintings, the force and elegance of simplicity mark the culmination of the entire gueridon series. An extension of the gueridons was a series of billiard tables emphasizing rectangular forms and focusing on the playing table from various angles simultaneously. The largest and most dazzling of the so-called billiards dates from 1947 to 1949 and shows a pinched table with flared raised ends done in lavish greens.

In 1949, Braque started his famous studio series, the apogee of his art. It is a series of eight large canvases that represent the metaphysical aspects of the artist’s own studio. Each is meditative and atmospheric. The first is the most realistic and direct in design: A large white pitcher in the upper canvas stands in its own canvas against a black background and below it, to the left, is another smaller canvas with a black pitcher contrasted on the left beside a plate of fruit on a white tablecloth.

Braque’s last works have an extreme simplicity of design and color, such as his birds for the ceiling in the Etruscan gallery of the Louvre or his Doves (1958). At the very end, he returned to the landscape theme of his youth. These are paintings such as The Boat (1958), The Plough (1959-1960), and The Weeding Machine (1961-1963). The last one was his final work. It is deeply impressionistic and atmospheric. The weeding machine stands deserted in the light and shadow of an approaching storm, and the sky presents a small white cloud, as brown birds fly near the old weeder on the just harvested field. It is a deeply nostalgic piece. Braque died on August 31, 1963, after completing this work.

Significance

Braque rejected the notion of the realistic relationship between the actual and the painted object. Instead, he made it clear that the painted apple never was supposed to represent a real apple. Its reality, rather, was that it is a painted apple and not a painting of an apple. This meant that a painting was the artist’s two-dimensional interpretation of reality. Braque rejected the Renaissance notion of perspective, which gave the illusion of a third dimension to a flat surface. He did not want to create this false notion. Art, according to him, is an autonomous reality. Still lifes allowed Braque to limit his experimentation to a small number of objects but to know that range thoroughly. It was this purposeful limitation that determined his style. These still lifes became his microcosm of the universe and allowed him the use of familiar things in their own natural environment. From them he could create universal and archetypal shapes, particularly transforming birds into metaphysical creatures in flights of fancy to the world of imagination. In the end, he succeeded in making the simplest objects believable by lifting them from the ordinary and everyday to the signs and symbols of his own puristic art.

Bibliography

Antliff, Mark, and Patricia Leighten. Cubism and Culture. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. A good, focused history of cubism. Recommended for students and general readers exploring cubism as a cultural phenomenon with an influence that reached beyond the art world.

Braque, Georges. Georges Braque. Edited by Jean Leymarie. Munich: Prestel, 1988. This is an excellent work with important contributions by Carla Schulz-Hoffmann and Magdalena M. Moeller. Especially important is the analysis, painting by painting and in chronological order, of the main works of Braque. The color plates are magnificent.

Danchev, Alex. Georges Braque: A Life. New York: Arcade, 2005. Comprehensive full-length biography, including discussion of Braque’s private life and his relationship with Pablo Picasso.

Hope, Henry R. Georges Braque. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949. This is one of the earliest and best monographs on Braque. Unfortunately, its color plates are of very poor quality. Nevertheless, its analysis of Braque’s art forms the basis of all later criticism.

Leymarie, Jean. Braque. Translated by James Emmons. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1961. Leymarie, a French expert on Braque, also knew the artist. His view of Braque’s art gained from this acquaintance, because he was able to ask a very private and quiet person about important aspects of his art. The color plates are average.

Mullins, Edwin B. The Art of Georges Braque. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968. This is a thoughtful analysis of the person and the artist with reasonably good illustrations. The author’s four digressions in chapters 6, 8, 10, and 11 are the best and most provocative parts of this book.

Richardson, John. Georges Braque. New York: Penguin Books, 1959. This is an excellent introduction to Braque. It is brief and understandable and has many illustrations at the back, though of poor quality.

Zurcher, Bernard. Georges Braque: Life and Work. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. A good, comprehensive work on Braque the person and artist. It is a rewarding reading in art appreciation, and its color plates are excellent. It approaches the artist’s works in topical groups. Especially noteworthy is the inclusion and analysis of the artist’s sketches.