Georges Braque

Georges Braque (Argenteuil, 13 May 1882 – Paris, 31 August 1963) was a major 20th century French painter, collagist, printmaker and sculptor who, with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as Cubism.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity, and to enforce one reading of the picture – that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas".^[1] The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.

A major idea of Braque's was the fractured stringed instrument as a cubist model. This he painted a number of times with variations, and made sculptures with fractured violins, guitars, etc., inside transparent acrylic (perspex) blocks. Examples:

• Violin and Candlestick, Paris, spring 1910, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
• Woman with a Guitar, 1913. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

Notes

1. Ernst Gombrich 1960. Art and Illusion, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media, p.12

Other websites

• Features an excellent selection of Braque paintings, with a rather weak text: The course of a painter in the representation of the landscape: Georges Braque Archived 2013-01-25 at the Wayback Machine