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Georges Braque Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Unlike Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque paintings were devoid of iconological commentary and were concerned purely with pictorial space and composition. George sought after balance and harmony in his compositions, particularly through papier colles, a pasted paper collage technique that he and Pablo invented in 1912.

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.

Understanding Pablo Picasso's goals, Georges aimed to strengthen the constructive elements in his Georges Braque paintings while foregoing of the expressive excesses of Fauvism. It was from his landscape paintings of scenes distilled into basic shapes and colors, that French art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, drew inspiration from, to coin the term Cubism, to describe Georges' work as bizarreries cubiques.

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 1930s, Georges Braque paintings portrayed Greek horses and deities, stripped of their symbolism and viewed through a purely formal lens. They were exercises in calligraphy because they were not strictly about figures, rather more about sheer lines and shapes.




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