Georges BRAQUE 1882-1963

Georges Braque, born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil and died on 31 August 1963 in Paris, led a life entirely devoted to painting. Trained in Le Havre and later established in Paris, he moved from Fauvism to a formal exploration inspired by Paul Cézanne, which led him to fragment volumes and space.

From 1908 onward, his artistic dialogue with Pablo Picasso gave rise to Analytical Cubism, a period in which Braque favored still lifes and the study of planes.

He introduced new signs into painting (stenciled letters and textures) and invented pasted paper (collage) in 1912, a decisive gesture for pictorial materiality (attention was turned to the surface and to the very substance of painting: support, texture, impasto, pasted papers or marouflage of the work; the aim was to make painting be felt as an object).

Mobilized during the First World War and seriously wounded, Georges Braque returned to a calmer mode of painting in which the still life became the laboratory for his exploration of form and light.

During the interwar years he deepened the material and structural aspects of his compositions while preserving that remarkable formal coherence. After 1930 he alternated landscapes, figures and still lifes, exploring texture, color and the silent presence of objects.

In the 1950s he received major commissions and established his place in museum collections, where his works are presented as touchstones of Cubism and of twentieth‑century French painting.

Still life remained at the center of his work. It served as a field of experimentation in which Braque reconciled formal innovation with pictorial tradition. He consistently testified to an ongoing pursuit of simplicity, silence, and truth: fidelity to material, to form, and to the construction of the work.