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7/2/2002

Braque (1882-1963)

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid is holding a retrospective exhibition devoted to the French artist Georges Braque. Sponsored by Banco Urquijo, the exhibition will provide Spanish visitors, and particularly those in Madrid, with their first chance to see a broad overview of the French painter's entire oeuvre. The project has been devised by Tomàs Llorens, chief curator of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, associate director of the Centre Georges Pompidou, and Jean-Louis Prat, director of the Maeght Foundation.

A key painter of the 20th century

The main objective of the exhibition is to provide a complete overview of Braque's artistic career as well as to convey his role as one of the key painters of the 20th century. To achieve this aim, a group of 50 paintings and 6 sculptures have been loaned from museums and private collections around the world: the Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), the Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), the Tate Gallery (London), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée de Grenoble, the Musée Picasso (Paris), the Paule and Adrien Maeght Collection, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber, the Menil Collection (Houston), the Fondation Margerite et Aimé Maeght, the Collection of M. and Mme. Claude Lorens, etc.

Among the key events of Braque's career was undoubtedly the co-invention of Cubism together with Picasso, representing a key chapter in the history of modern art. Alongside Picasso, Braque's creation of new techniques and pictorial devices such as papier collé and painted words, his unique interpretation of the traditional genres of painting, in particular landscape and still life, his constant rethinking and investigation of the representation of space, volume and colour, and the solutions he formulated in his works have all become landmarks in the history of 20th-century art. In addition, their influence on numerous contemporary artists is both an obvious and extremely important one.

From his early Fauve landscapes and the paintings of the Cubist years to the late Ateliers and Birds series, Braque's work undergoes a gradual transformation which is clearly demonstrated in this exhibition. Nonetheless, throughout his lengthy career, he remained faithful to certain key ideas: the Cubist idiom, which he never abandoned; an interest in the tactile and sensual qualities of the paint; the relationship between colour and material; and above, all, his greatest interest, the process of creating pictorial space, of fusing the subject with its surroundings and the representation of the solidity of space. As the vehicle through which to achieve this end, Braque mainly used the still life, which he interpreted in innumerable different ways, although always using the same familiar objects; musical instruments, his painting implements and other items normally found in his studio. It was only on specific occasions that he worked in other genres, principally landscape, while particularly during the years of Analytical Cubism he turned to the representation of the human figure.

The exhibition is organised into nine areas in which works are arranged both chronologically and thematically, in keeping with the development and evolution of Braque's work:

- A Fauve artist
- Towards Cubism
- Analytical Cubism
- Synthetic Cubism
- Post-Cubist Still Lifes
- Large Interiors
- Late Interiors
- The Return to Landscape
- Birds

Georges Braque (Argenteuil-sur-Seine 1882 - Paris 1963)

Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil-sur-Seine. His father owned an interior decorating company and in 1899 Braque abandoned his studies and joined his father's company as an apprentice in Le Havre. The following year he moved from Normandy to Paris to continue his training as a painter-decorator and after he returned from Military Service in 1902 Braque dedicated himself exclusively to painting.

Braque studied for a while at the Académie Humbert, where fellow-pupils included Francis Picabia and Marie Laurencin, and his first artistic efforts were landscapes. Influenced by the Impressionist paintings which he saw in the galleries of Durand-Ruel and Vollard and in the Musée du Luxembourg, Braque began to use pure colours in his canvases, following the example of his friends Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy. In 1905, he was greatly struck by paintings by Henri Matisse and André Derain exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, leading him to embark on his own Fauve experiments.

Braque spent the summer of 1906 in Antwerp with Othon Friesz and in the autumn of that year he set out for L'Estaque, in search of the footprints of Cézanne. There, the artist's palette became brighter under the influence of the young Fauves, with whom he exhibited at the 1907 Salon des Indépendants. In October of that year he saw the exhibitions devoted to Cézanne at the Salon d'Automne and the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, both of which were to be enormously influential for his later work. At the end of that year Braque met Guillaume Apollinaire who presented him to Picasso, at that date working on the Demoiselles d'Avignon. Looking at Picasso's work changed the course of Braque's painting. From then on until 1914, Picasso and Braque worked in close collaboration, establishing the fundamentals of the new pictorial language of Cubism. The landscapes of L'Estaque which Braque painted in the spring and summer of 1908, and which he submitted to the Salon d'Automne that year, show an already reduced palette and a notably volumetric quality to the forms. These paintings were rejected by the selection committee but were exhibited by Kahnweiler in the celebrated exhibition which gave rise to the new movement.

In 1909 the relationship between Picasso and Braque became closer as both artists focused more intently on the constructive element of their still lifes and portraits. The two worked together in Céret in the summer of 1911. One year later they experimented with the effects to be achieved with collage. Around 1912, in order to avoid the loss of contact with the visible world which Cubism had drifted towards, Braque began to paint some areas in trompe-l'oeil, imitating marble and wood, drawing on his skills as a decorative painter which he had learned from his father. Later, he went a step further by sticking labels, pieces of wallpaper and cuttings from real newspapers onto his compositions. These papiers collés were to be another of the revolutionary innovations which Picasso and Braque brought to modern art. Their collaboration, however, became less intense from 1913 onwards, during the period of the development of so-called Synthetic Cubism.

At the outbreak of World War I, Braque was called up and sent to the front at Artois, where he was seriously wounded in the head, as was Apollinaire, although Braque escaped the tragic consequences that befell his friend. After the war, his work continued to show the influence of Cubism, but became more figurative. Along with the production of numerous still lifes at that period, he was also active as an illustrator as well as writing theoretical works on art such as the Pensées et réflexions sur la peinture of 1917.

Until the 1940s, Braque remained faithful to the Cubist aesthetic although greatly diluted both in form and colouring. By that time he was acknowledged as one of the great artists of the École de Paris, working on set designs for two ballets by Diaghilev and starting to receive numerous important awards. From the 1930s on, Braque worked in the medium of sculpture while towards the end of his life he turned to jewellery design. In 1953 he designed the stained-glass windows for the church at Varengeville. However, the most significant works within his late pictorial output were the famous Ateliers compositions, reinterpretations of his favourite subjects. They represent one of the high points of his career.

Georges Braque died in Paris on 31 August 1963. From the 1930s onwards, numerous monographic and retrospective exhibitions were devoted to his work, while he was honoured with many international awards.

Organiser: Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Sponsor: Banco Urquijo

Curators: Tomàs Llorens, chief curator, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum; Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, associate director, Centre Georges Pompidou; Jean-Louis Prat, director, Maeght Foundation Co-ordination: Paloma Alarcó, curator of Modern Painting, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Paseo del Prado 8 E-28014 Madrid t +34 913690151
Opening times: Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am to 7pm. Ticket office closes at 6.30pm. Open all day Sundays. Closed Mondays

Image: George Braque: La Mandore, 1909-1910. oil on canvaso, 73 x 60 cm. Tate Gallery, London

Entrance charges: Temporary Exhibition, 3.60 , 600 ptas (reduced charge, 2.40 , 400 ptas for students and visitors aged over 65)
Temporary Exhibition + Permanent Collection, 6.60 , 1,100 ptas (reduced charge; 3.60 , 600 ptas for students and visitors aged over 65)

Publications: catalogue with texts by the three curators of the exhibition.

For more information and images, please contact: Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Press Office

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