Braque, Georges

1882-1963
Braque, Georges Biography

French painter, one of the important revolutionaries of 20th-century art who, together with Pablo Picasso, developed Cubism.

Braque was born May 13, 1882, in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, near Paris; he grew up there and in the port city of Le Havre. In 1902 he settled in Paris to pursue the study of fine art; Braque was deeply impressed by the bold style of artworks exhibited in 1905 by the fauves. The fauves included Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, who painted with brilliant colors and a loose structure of forms to capture the most intense emotional response. Braque adopted fauvism from 1906 to 1907.

By 1908, however, Braque had shifted his attention to the oil paintings of Paul Cezanne, who was reputed to have restored order and discipline to the extremes of artistic expression. Braque's interest in Cezanne's strangely distorted forms and unconventional perspective led him to paint in the manner that came to be called cubist.

Picasso, with whom Braque began to work closely in 1909, had been developing a similar approach to oil painting. Both artists produced oil paintings of neutralized color and complex patterns of faceted form, now called analytical cubism, in about 1910 to 1912, as demonstrated in Braque's Violin and Pitcher (1910, Kunstmuseum, Basel).

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