Georges Braque
Georges Braque
Georges Braquewas a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1906, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque’s work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth13 May 1882
CityArgenteuil, France
CountryFrance
Georges Braque quotes about
Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.
I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction...
Perspective starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye...
I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same.
I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow.
I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part.
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.
There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture.
Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false.
Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.
To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.
Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.
It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.
To work from nature is to improvise.