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
The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.
With age, art and life become one.
When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.
Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.
The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this... ...Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.
There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Art is made to trouble but science reassures.
What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space.
Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.