Georges Braque
Co-founder of Cubism.
Georges Braque developed Cubism together with Picasso and invented papier collé, collage with paper.
Georges Braque was born in 1882 in Argenteuil outside Paris and grew up in Le Havre. His father ran a house-painting business, and Georges first trained as a decorative painter. There he learned to paint imitation wood and marble and to use stencils for lettering, skills he later carried over into his art.
He studied art in Le Havre and Paris and in 1905–1907 joined the Fauves with landscapes in strong colours. In 1907 he saw both a large memorial exhibition of Cézanne and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. This transformed his painting. His landscapes from L’Estaque in 1908 consisted of simplified houses and trees that resembled cubes. A critic spoke of “cubes”, and that gave rise to the name Cubism.
From 1908 to 1914 Braque and Picasso worked so closely together that their pictures are sometimes hard to tell apart. Braque later compared them to two mountaineers roped together. He introduced lettering into painting and in 1912 invented papier collé, in which pieces of wallpaper and paper are pasted into the picture. The colours were muted, often brown, grey and green, and the motifs were guitars, violins, bottles and newspapers.
During the First World War he suffered a severe head wound in 1915 and had to undergo an operation. After the war he worked alone and developed a calmer, more sensuous kind of painting. He painted still lifes, billiard tables and a long series of studio pictures. In his last years birds became a recurring motif. He painted a ceiling in the Louvre with birds against a blue sky.
In 1961 Braque became the first living artist to be given an exhibition at the Louvre. He died in 1963 and was given a state funeral. He is regarded as the co-creator of Cubism and one of the great French painters of the 20th century.