Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Georges Braque Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Georges Braque paintings were at the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. They focused on still lives and on means of viewing objects from various perspectives through color, line and texture. Georges is best known for Cubist works done in collaboration with Pablo Picasso. However, Georges himself has a long painting career that continued beyond Cubism.

Georges took papier colles, a pasted paper collage technique that he and Pablo Picasso invented in 1912, one step further, through the gluing of cut-up advertisements into his Georges Braque paintings. This was actually a foreshadowing of modern art movements concerned with critiquing media, including Pop art.

Georges Braque paintings took a drastic change in 1907 after Georges seeing Pablo Picasso's breakthrough work in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The encounter led to an intimate friendship and artistic camaraderie between the two painters. They would get together every single day to discuss and assay the ideas that were forming in their individual heads and to compare their respective works.

Georges and Pablo worked in synchronicity until Georges' return from war in 1914. Georges felt that Pablo betrayed their Cubist systems and rules, when Pablo began painting figuratively. It was then that Georges decided to work on his own Georges Braque paintings.

Georges Braque paintings continued to be works of a true Analytical Cubist, much longer than Pablo Picasso, whose style, subject matter and palettes changed continuously. What was most interesting to Georges was the showcasing of how objects look when viewed over time in different temporal spaces and pictorial planes.

In the latter half of the 1930s, Georges Braque paintings consisted of Georges' Vanitas series, where he existentially considered death and suffering. Georges explored ways in which his brushstrokes and paint qualities could enhance his subject matter, as he grew increasingly obsessed with the physicality of his paintings. The objects Georges used in his still life paintings were highly personal, which is perhaps why he left their meanings unrevealed and unexplained.




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