Georges Braque
Georges Braque was a French oil painting artist and
sculptor, and with
Pablo Picasso one
of the inventors of
cubism.
Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France. He grew up
in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like
his father and grandfather, but he also studied oil painting in the
evenings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in le Havre from about 1897 to
1899. He apprenticed in Paris under a decorator and was awarded his
certificate in 1901. The following year he attended the Academie
Hummer and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie
Laurencin and Francis Picabia.
His early work was
impressionistic,
however he was impressed by the bold style of work exhibited by the
Fauves in 1905 and soon changed to a Fauvist style. They used
brilliant colours and loose structures of forms to capture the most
intense emotional response. The Fauves included, among others,
Henri Matisse and
Andre Derain. 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, Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to
paint.
In 1907, Braque successfully exhibited works in the Fauve style in
the Salon des Indépendants. The same year, Braque's style began a
slow evolution as he came under the strong influence of
Paul Cézanne, who
died in 1906, and whose works were widely exhibited in Paris.
Braque's paintings began to evidence his new interest in geometry
and simultaneous perspective. Beginning in 1909, Braque worked
closely with
Pablo Picasso to
develop the style known as
Cubism. In 1912, they
began to experiment with collage and papier collé. Their
collaboration continued until 1914 when Braque left Paris to fight
in the First World War.
Braque was injured in the First World War, after which he moved
away from the harsher abstraction of cubism, towards the hermetic
and synthetic forms ? the most abstract forms of cubism.
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