Georges Braque was a French painter who developed Cubism alongside Pablo Picasso beginning around 1908, the two working in such close, near-daily exchange for several years that Braque later compared their collaboration to mountaineers roped together. His 1908 landscapes painted at L'Estaque, reducing houses and hillsides to blocky geometric planes, prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe the work dismissively as bizarreries cubiques, bizarre little cubes, the origin of the movement's own name. Braque and Picasso developed Cubism through an Analytic phase that fractured subjects into overlapping planes seen from multiple angles at once, and a later Synthetic phase that introduced collage and pasted paper (papier colle) directly into painting, a technique Braque is credited with originating in 1912.
Facts
Active From Year Active To Year TrainingApprenticed in his family house-painting and decorating trade in Le Havre before studying painting at the Academie Humbert in Paris 1 Connections
Associated With
Braque and Picasso developed Cubism together in close, near-daily working exchange from about 1908 to 1914.
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
In Movement
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
Practices
Works Created
Source Gardner's Art Through the AgesFred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)
In the Other Atlases
- Also in Geography Atlas: France, nationality there.
Sources
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage Learning- chapter on Cubism, section on Georges Braque
Gender reference
His 1908 landscapes painted at L'Estaque, reducing houses and hillsides to blocky geometric planes, prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to describe the work dismissively as bizarreries cubiques, bizarre little cubes, the origin of the movement's own name.
Tate
Tate, United KingdomPractices: Collage, Art Terms: Papier ColleView the Source Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Associated With: Pablo Picasso
Popular accounts of Cubism's origin, drawing on Picasso's far greater subsequent fame, often center on his 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as the movement's true starting point and cast Picasso as the primary inventive genius with Braque as a close but secondary collaborator. A dissenting, art-historically documented view, developed at length in the Museum of Modern Art's own Cubism scholarship (including William Rubin's and John Golding's writing on the movement), holds that this framing undervalues Braque's equally foundational contributions: his 1908 L'Estaque landscapes, painted independently of Picasso and the direct occasion for the movement's name, and his invention of papier colle in 1912, a technique central to Cubism's Synthetic phase. Braque himself objected during his lifetime to accounts that reduced his role to Picasso's follower, describing their several years of near-daily working exchange as closer to two mountaineers roped together.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneMuseum of Modern Art Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.