The Artist Georges Braque

ALL ARTISTS

Georges Braque, the French painter, was born in Argenteuil, France, May 13, 1882 and died in Paris, August 31, 1963. His father had a small decorating business and also was an amateur painter. Georges Braque's artisan origins influenced his career, as did a childhood passed at Le Havre, where, like the impressionists, he responded to the marine luminosity of the Normandy coast. Going to Paris in 1900, he was participating by 1906 in the dazzling but short-lived revolt of the Fauves.

In 1907 he met Pablo Picasso, and the two friends played leading roles in the ensuing revolution: the creation of cubism. Beginning in 1908, they busied themselves with the constructive simplifications by which analytical, or hermetic, cubism was evolved. This excludes all considerations of light and space, combining in severe monochrome, on the strict plane of the canvas, purely conceptual memories of objects reduced to their diverse geometric projections. Thus, even in its early phase, these audacious innovators pushed cubism, essentially an intellectual style, to its extreme consequences. During the summer of 1912, which they spent at Sorgues (near Avignon), Picasso and Braque introduced fabrics, sand, and paper into their paintings-the device called collage. The use of this violent technique furthered the multiple simultaneity of later cubism.

After service in World War I, during which he was wounded and twice cited, Braque inaugurated in 1917 a flexible cubism in which the object is clearly legible. Thenceforth his most personal qualities came into full bloom, and he became one of the masters of still life. In this genre, which requires taste, moderation, and studious reflection, he is the inheritor of the great French classical painters-the realists of the 17th century and Jean Baptiste Chardin. Using the most familiar objects picked up in his studio, he constructed compositions that were more or less vast, more or less learned, noble in arrangement, and painted in sober, muted tones, with infinite delicacy. During one period he introduced figures into his interiors, and with bold, assured strokes raised them to the highest degree of decorative majesty. His freedom and assurance of touch, combined with the lofty reasonableness of his art, earned him a commission to decorate a ceiling of the Louvre in 1952.

One of the creators of modern art, Braque is also a craftsman, excelling in stage scenery, book illustration, lithography, and stained-glass work. He is, further, an outstanding sculptor, and his plaster reliefs, inspired by archaic styles, are utterly original.