Georges Braque
Georges Braque | |
---|---|
Born | Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise, France | 13 May 1882
Died | 31 August 1963 Paris, France | (aged 81)
Resting place | L'église Saint-Valery, Varengeville-sur-mer, Normandy |
Known for | Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking |
Movement | Cubism, Fauvism |
Patron(s) | Fernand Mourlot |
Georges Braque (
Early life
Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in
Fauvism
Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" (Beasts) in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon 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, to Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint.[1]
In May 1907, he successfully exhibited works of the Fauve style in the
Cubism
Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque.
Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with
A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911,[6] 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. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique.[7]
On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes".[8]
Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" (cubic oddities) after seeing a painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.[9]
The term 'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the
The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness.[11] He was trepanned, and required a long period of recuperation.
The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain.
Later work
Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. He developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his emphasis on structure. One example of this is his 1943 work Blue Guitar, which hangs in the Allen Memorial Art Museum.[14] During his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris.
He continued to work during the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of paintings, graphics, and sculptures. Braque, along with Matisse, is credited for introducing Pablo Picasso to Fernand Mourlot, and most of the lithographs and book illustrations he himself created during the 1940s and '50s were produced at the Mourlot Studios. In 1952–53 he also produced The Birds, a ceiling painting for a room in the Louvre. In 1962 Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of etchings and aquatints titled L’Ordre des Oiseaux (The Order of Birds),[15] which was accompanied by the poet Saint-John Perse's text.[16]
Braque died on 31 August 1963 in Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy whose windows he designed. Braque's work is in most major museums throughout the world.
Style
Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty "… in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty [he] interpret[s] [his] subjective impression...”[17] He described "objects shattered into fragments... [as] a way of getting closest to the object...Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space”.[18] He adopted a monochromatic and neutral color palette in the belief that such a palette would emphasize the subject matter.
Although Braque began his career painting landscapes, during 1908 he, alongside Picasso, discovered the advantages of painting still lifes instead. Braque explained that he
“... began to concentrate on still lifes, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space... This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them... In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life”
During the period between the wars, Braque exhibited a freer, more relaxed style of Cubism, intensifying his color use and a looser rendering of objects. However, he still remained committed to the cubist method of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. In contrast to Picasso, who continuously reinvented his style of painting, producing both representational and cubist images, and incorporating surrealist ideas into his work, Braque continued in the Cubist style, producing luminous, other-worldly still life and figure compositions. By the time of his death in 1963, he was regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the School of Paris, and of modern art.
2010 theft
On 20 May 2010, the
Gallery
-
Georges Braque, 1908, Plate and Fruit Dish, oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm, private collection
-
Georges Braque, 1908, Cinq bananes et deux poires (Five Bananas and Two Pears), oil on canvas, 24 × 33 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne
-
Georges Braque, 1908, Maisons à l'Estaque (Houses at l'Estaque), oil on canvas, 73 × 59.5 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern
-
Georges Braque, 1908–09, Fruit Dish, oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
-
Georges Braque, 1909, Port en Normandie (Little Harbor in Normandy), 81.1 × 80.5 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago
-
Georges Braque, 1909, La Roche-Guyon, le château (The Castle at Roche-Guyon), oil on canvas, 80 × 59.5 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
-
Georges Braque, 1909 (September), Violin and Palette (Violon et palette, Dans l'atelier), oil on canvas, 91.7 × 42.8 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
-
Georges Braque, 1909–10, Pitcher and Violin, oil on canvas, 116.8 × 73.2 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel
-
Georges Braque, 1910, Femme tenant une Mandoline, 92 × 73 cm, Bavarian State Painting Collections
-
Georges Braque, 1910, Portrait of a Woman, Female Figure (Torso Ženy), oil on canvas, 91 × 61 cm, private collection
-
Georges Braque, 1911, Nature morte (Still Life), Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, 1912
-
Georges Braque, 1911, Nature Morte (The Pedestal Table), oil on canvas, 116.5 × 81.5 cm,Georges Pompidou Center, Paris
-
Georges Braque, 1911–12, Girl with a Cross, oil on canvas, 55 × 43 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
-
Georges Braque, 1911–12, Man with a Guitar (Figure, L'homme à la guitare), oil on canvas, 116.2 × 80.9 cm (45.75 × 31.9 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York
-
Georges Braque, 1912, Violin: "Mozart Kubelick", oil on canvas, 45.7 × 61 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
-
Georges Braque, 1913, Nature morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs), oil, gouache and charcoal on canvas, 81 × 60 cm (31.8 × 23.6 in),Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
-
Georges Braque, 1913, Femme à la guitare (Woman with Guitar), oil and charcoal on canvas, 130 × 73 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
-
Georges Braque, 1913–14, Still Life on a Table (Duo pour Flute), oil on canvas, 45.7 × 55.2 cm, Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
-
Georges Braque, 1914, Violon et verre (Violin and Glass), oil, charcoal and pasted paper on canvas, oval, 116 × 81 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel
-
Georges Braque, 1914, Man With a Guitar, oil on canvas, 130 × 73 cm,Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
-
Georges Braque, 1918, Rhum et guitare (Rum and Guitar), oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm, Colección Abelló, Madrid
-
Georges Braque, 1927, Still Life with Grapes and Clarinet, oil on canvas, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
See also
References and sources
- References
- ^ a b c "Georges Braque | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art.
- ^ "Interpol issues global alert for stolen art - CNN.com". www.cnn.com.
- ^ Fry 1966, p. 71.
- ^ Perl, Jed (2011-10-26). "Relevance of Irrelevance". The New Republic. Retrieved 2011-10-28.
- ISBN 0-87070-528-8p. 99,
- ^ "Solomon_R._Guggenheim_Museum". Archived from the original on February 10, 2013.
- ISBN 0714832502
- ^ "Gil Blas / dir. A. Dumont". Gallica. November 14, 1908.
- ^ Louis Vauxcelles, Le Salon des Indépendants, Gil Blas, 25 March 1909, Gallica (BnF)
- ^ Ernst Gombrich (1960) Art and Illusion, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media, p.12 "McLuhan: Understanding Media". Archived from the original on 2007-10-11. Retrieved 2007-09-04.
- ^ Oxford Art Online, "Georges Braque"
- ISBN 0-14-021316-3
- ISBN 978-0-7861-0642-4p. 93
- ^ "Allen Memorial Art Museum" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2010-05-27.
- ^ Grimes, William (January 29, 2009). "Aldo Crommelynck, Master Printer for Prominent Artists, Is Dead at 77". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
- ^ Mellby, Julie L. (November 30, 2011). "L'ordre des oiseaux". Highlights from the Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library. Retrieved 2012-05-27.
- ^ Mullins 1968, p. 34.
- ^ Mullins 1968, p. 55.
- ^ Mullins 1968, p. 41.
- ^ a b Hewage, Tim (20 May 2010). "Thief Steals Paintings In Paris Art Heist". Sky News. Archived from the original on 26 August 2010. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
- ^ Jones, Sam (20 May 2010). "Picasso and Matisse masterpieces stolen from Paris museum". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
- ^ "Matisse, Picasso and other masterpieces stolen from Paris museum". France 24. 20 May 2010. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
- ^ Bremner, Charles (20 May 2010). "Masked thief steals masterpieces worth €500 million from Paris museum". The Times. Retrieved 20 May 2010.
- Sources
- Clement, Russell T. (1994). Georges Braque: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29235-4
- Orozco, Miguel (2018) "The Complete Prints of Georges Braque. Catalogue raisonné". Academia.edu
- Fry, Edward F. (1966). "Cubism 1907-1908: An Early Eyewitness Account". Art Bulletin 48: 71–73.
- Mullins, Edwin (1968). The Art of Georges Braque. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Picasso, P., Rubin, W. S., & Fluegel, J. (1980). Pablo Picasso, a retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ISBN 0-87070-528-8
External links
- Georges Braque at the Museum of Modern Art
- Artcyclopedia - Links to Braque's works and information
- Georges Braque works at insecula.com
- Site du ministère de la culture et de la communication
- Georges Braque in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
- Georges Braque, L'Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d'esthétique, 1920. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France