George Braque

We are looking at the ‘Studio’ paintings of George Braque. I have added a couple of his paintings from this series to inspire us.

Braque and Picasso developed Cubism around 1908. Braque’s work that followed stayed very much within the parameters of Cubism, whereas Picasso investigated many other ways of making art.

Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also studied artistic painting during evenings at the École supérieure d'art et design Le Havre-Rouen, previously known as the École supérieure des Arts in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902. The next year, he attended the Académie Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there until 1904.

I attach a link to an article by John Richardson that provides some fascinating observations about the artist. https://lithub.com/inside-the-artist-studio-of-georges-braque/

The next work is from 1918 and the second from 1944. The earlier painting combines both colour and strong design to explore his ideas about pattern, space, and line

The later painting has all three of those elements as well as referencing his early apprenticeship with his father’s decorating business. At that time skills such as mimicking wood grain, marble effects, and other materials were a part of the craft of decorating. Braque uses those skills within his interior paintings.