Georges Braque

(1882-1963)

"Painter of contained richness, of silent truths, of deep, secret knowledge[1] ".

Georges Braque is one of the major artists of the twentieth century. In "rope" with Picasso, he invented cubism, one of the most important revolutions in art of this period. Braque came from a family of house painters and was destined to become a decorative painter. He grew up in Le Havre where he became friends with Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz. He moved to Paris to a studio in Montmartre in 1904. At the 1905 Salon d'Automne, the discovery of works by Matisse and Derain, brought back from Collioure where they had spent the summer, made a strong impression on him. Fauvist painting, dynamic and full of enthusiasm, influenced his work during the following summer. Cézanne's work quickly nourished his thinking, especially since the painter from Aix-en-Provence, who died in October 1906, was in the limelight at the time: a retrospective exhibition paid tribute to him at the Salon d'Automne in 1907, as well as the Bernheim-Jeune gallery.

The discovery of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, June-July 1907 (New York, Museum of Modern Art) in Picasso's studio at the end of November and the beginning of December marked the beginning of a dialogue between the two artists through works of art - also nourished by works of Matisse, such as Nu bleu souvenir de Biskra 1907 (Baltimore, Museum of Art) and Derain - which would lead them to Cubism. Braque stayed several times in L'Estaque, following in the footsteps of Cézanne. The Salon d'Automne of 1908 refused the landscapes he had painted there during the summer. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler presented them in his young gallery in the rue Vignon from November 9 to 28. It was the first public exhibition of Cubism. It brings together twenty-seven landscapes with pronounced volumes and no perspective, embodying what Braque referred to as a tactile, palpable space, in which the objects, the subject, give the feeling of being in the same space as the viewer.

"Following in Cézanne's footsteps, we've introduced a perspective that puts objects within reach of the hand and signifies them in relation to the artist himself. Bringing things closer to the viewer's gaze, fostering the communion of the tactile and the visual. [...] It's good to make people see what you can, but if you can make them touch it at the same time, that's even better.[2] ".

The dialogue between the two artists intensified. Braque spent the summer and early autumn of 1909 at La-Roche-Guyon, while Picasso was at Horta de Ebro. In the series of paintings devoted to the Château de La-Roche-Guyon, Braque gives as much pictorial importance to the space between objects as to the objects themselves. Picasso, for his part, produced portraits of Fernande in which surfaces are cut into facets. These works inaugurated Analytical Cubism. In Les Usines du Rio Tinto à L'Estaque, autumn 1910 (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou), the subject is less and less legible. The two artists worked together during the summers of 1911 in Céret and 1912 in Sorgues. This was the beginning of the hermetic phase of Analytical Cubism, a time when they were undoubtedly closest to each other, and when they vied with each other in their innovations to thwart the tendency of their representations to become too abstruse. "We had to get out of analytic cubism; we were aware of the danger that too much hermeticism, too much abstraction, could represent.[3] ". In Le Portugais (Basel, Kunstmuseum), Braque introduces trompe-l'œil surfaces into his painting for the first time: stenciled typographic elements, letters and numbers in block letters.

"In 1911, I introduced letters into my paintings. These were forms in which there was nothing to distort because, being flat surfaces, the letters were out of space, and their presence in the painting, by contrast, made it possible to distinguish objects that were in space from those that were out of space.[4] ".

In the same year, he mixed various materials with paint (sawdust, sand, etc.) to enhance its tactile dimension and create relief. "I wanted to turn the brushstroke into a form of matter[5] ". His tactile sensitivity to matter is an omnipresent dimension of Braque's work. In the spring of 1912, Picasso produced the first collage, Nature morte à la chaise cannée (Musée national Picasso-Paris), and a few months later, in the summer, Braque executed the first papier collé, Compotier et verre (The Leonard A. Lauder Cubist collection), described by Picasso as a "paperistic and pusiéreux [sic] process".[6] ". With paper collage (synthetic cubism), which reintroduces real elements into pictorial space, representing only themselves, color returns to their painting. In 1914, paper collage evolved towards a more decorative and pictorial dimension, with the use of painted, speckled, gouached and overpainted paper. This is what is known as decorative cubism.

The war put an abrupt end to this extraordinary creative period. When war was declared in early August 1914, Braque was mobilized. It was the end of an era. "On August 2, 1914, I took Braque and Derain to the Avignon train station.[7] ". Braque was seriously wounded in the head in May 1915. His convalescence was long. Kahnweiler, a German national, is exiled to Switzerland, and his gallery's assets, considered enemy property, are sequestered. At the end of November 1916 Braque signs a contract with Léonce Rosenberg's gallery l'Effort moderne. In 1917 Braque was demobilized and discharged. He returned to painting with works in the tradition of synthetic cubism: figures and still lifes in dark tones. The war marked a break. His painting became charged with melancholy. From then on, his work developed in series. In September 1920, on his return from Switzerland, Kahnweiler reopened his gallery under his partner's name, Galerie Simon, 29 rue d'Astorg. He resumed contact with his painters. Four escrow sales between June 13-14 1921 and May 7-8 1923 dispersed his gallery's pre-war collection. They flooded the market with Cubist works at attractive prices.

Alongside the still lifes, notably the guéridons, Braque undertook the set of chimneys (five between 1920 and 1927), and the Canéphores (1922), figures composed of a supple, undulating line, which led to a series of nudes until 1926-1927. The tactile dimension of the works from this period is due to the materiality of the paint composed of a thick paste. Presented at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 among numerous still lifes, gathered in a room entirely dedicated to Braque, the Canéphores aroused two opposing reactions: some saw in them a renunciation of Cubism in favor of the general trend of a return to order. Matisse's odalisques and Picasso's classicizing language provoke the same appreciation. For others, such as Carl Einstein, a great admirer of Braque, and Kahnweiler, they are, on the contrary, an extension of Cubism, a synthesis and a new beginning.

In 1923 and 1924 Braque composed sets and costumes for various ballets. Les Fâcheux and Zéphy et Flor for Serge de Diaghilev's ballets, and Salade for the Count of Beaumont. Since Parade in 1917, a huge success of scandal, most of the artists of the avant-garde collaborate with the Russian ballets of Serge de Diaghilev, the Swedish ballets of Rolf de Maré and, although to a lesser extent, the Soirées de Paris of the Count de Beaumont. Between 1919 and 1924 Picasso, Léger, Derain and Matisse were also involved in decorative work for the stage.

Braque left Montmartre for Montparnasse in 1925. He moved to 6, villa Nansouty, which became rue du Douanier, now renamed rue Georges Braque. In 1927, he painted more austere still lifes against a black background. Tériade devoted the second issue of his "Confidences d'artistes" series, published in L'Intransigeant in 1928 and 1929, to Georges Braque, whom he saw as "one of the most intelligent, profound and poetically sensitive figures in contemporary painting. [...] In painting, he does not want to reconstitute an external fact, but to constitute a pictorial fact.[8] ". From 1930 onwards, the artist spent six months of the year in Varengeville-sur-Mer.

In 1931 he made his first engraved plaster casts inspired by figures of gods and heroes of Greek antiquity: Heracles, Niké. While Vollard multiplied the editions of artists' books in 1930 and 1931, he asked Braque in 1932. The artist chose to illustrate the Theogony of Hesiod, a great text of Greek mythology, and one of his favorite texts. Braque executed a series of sixteen etchings between 1932 and 1935. The figures are composed of a very dynamic circulating line. The accidental death of Vollard in July 1939 interrupts the project - resumed and published by Maeght in 1955. The Theogony marks a turning point between the spirit of synthetic cubism and biomorphism. From then on, he used a supple and fluid arabesque line that created forms with organic accents that were very much in vogue in the production of artists of the time (Masson, Picasso).

In 1934, Carl Einstein published his monograph on Braque in French (published by Chroniques du Jour). The following year Braque met Jean Paulhan, then editor-in-chief of La Nouvelle Revue française. Paulhan undertook the reaction to Braque le patron in May 1942, completed in August. In 1936 the artist began the cycle of interiors with women at the easel or palette, black figures. After Matisse and Picasso, he received the Carnegie Prize in 1937 for The Yellow Tablecloth, 1935 (private collection). Braque's cubist works were presented in theEntartete Kunst exhibition in Munich, which stigmatized the art of the avant-garde. In an increasingly oppressive political context, Braque executed a series of vanities in 1938 and 1939 that combined the themes of the studio and death. On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The artist moved to Varengeville. He devoted himself to sculpture on mythological subjects.

On November 7, 1939, the first retrospective dedicated to Braque's work in America opened at the Arts Club of Chicago, designed in part by Paul Rosenberg[9]. A few days later, on November 15, the MoMA opened a Picasso retrospective(Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, until January 7, 1940).

Of Jewish origin, Paul Rosenberg closed his gallery in 1940. He took refuge in the free zone in Bordeaux. After the Armistice Braque returns to Paris. The suicide on July 3 of his friend Carl Einstein, pursued by the Gestapo, affected him deeply. In 1941 he produced a new series of still lifes with black and red fish and Workshops. The following year, he painted a series of interiors marked by the atmosphere of the war, still lifes with black teapots, and highly impastoed skulls. These works were exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1943, which devoted a retrospective exhibition to him (twenty-six paintings and nine sculptures). After D-Day he returned to Varengeville. He undertook larger works such as Le Salon de 1944 (Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou), the largest of his interiors at the time. The Salon d'Automne of the Liberation presents a large Picasso retrospective. In the fall, he began the Billiards series, which consisted of a total of seven paintings until 1949.

In August 1945, the artist underwent surgery for two stomach ulcers, and stopped painting for several months. In 1947, Aimé Maeght, who had inaugurated his Paris gallery on rue de Téhéran at the end of 1945 with a Matisse exhibition, became Braque's main dealer. In June, he devotes a first exhibition to Braque, accompanied by a special issue of Derrière le miroir (n°4). Braque meets René Char through Yvonne de Christian Zervos. Char writes his first text on the artist, "Georges Braque intramuros", then in Cahiers d'Art, on the occasion of the exhibition at Maeght's, "Œuvre terrestre comme aucune autre et pourtant combien harcelée du frisson des alchimies".[10] ". Maeght publishes Cahier de Georges Braque 1917-1947. The Venice Biennale awards him the Grand Prix International de Peinture in 1948 for Le Billard, 1944 (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou). He begins the Ateliers cycle. The Maeght gallery presents the first five in January 1949.

With Rouault, Léger, Chagall, Matisse, Germaine Richier, Braque participates in the decoration of the interior of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy, a symbol of the revival of sacred art led by Father Marie-Alain Couturier after the war. He executed a bronze bas-relief which takes up the Eucharistic symbol of the fish. The church was consecrated in 1950.

In 1951 and 1952, alongside large-scale works such as Atelier VI, VII and VIII, he painted small country landscapes. In June 1952, the issue of Derrière le miroir, which accompanied the Braque exhibition at Galerie Maeght, published the first text written by Alberto Giacometti on the artist: "Gris, brun, noir...[11] "

In the wake of the ceiling of the Apollo Gallery executed by Eugène Delacroix in 1851 and before that of the room of ancient bronzes painted by Cy Twombly in 2010, Georges Salles, then director of the Museums of France, commissioned Braque in 1953 to decorate the ceiling of the Henri II room of the Louvre Museum, where the Etruscan collections are presented. The ceiling, entitled The Birds, was inaugurated on April 21, 1953. Braque completed the Ateliers series in 1956; at the same time Picasso painted his "Interior Landscapes" which were set in California and were a tribute to Matisse who died in November 1954.