Cubism – Georges Braque

In this post I am studying purely one artist and their work, I will focus on the colour, line, shape, pattern, texture and composition that the artist has used.

I decided to choose Georges Braque because he is one of the creators of Cubism along with Picasso.

‘Braque’s paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation.’

Taken from Wikipedia.

Braque started pushing bondaries that no other artist had ever thought of, he took the basic principles of painting and and broke them down and explored them even further.

Houses at L’Estaque – 1908

Fruit Dish – 1908-09

Harbour in Normandy – 1909

In the picture “Houses at L’Estaque” you can see what the article above was saying about how Braque has reduced the architecture of the house to a simple geometric shape (cube). There are no windows and doors or no detail for the brick work, this also applies for the “Harbour in Normandy”. In the three pictures all the colour is the same which gives it this plain and simple style. Especially in “Fruit Dish” all the colours are similar, you cannot tell if the pieces of fruit are different to one another or if they are the same. Another thing that is similar to all three is the line and shape, they are all simple shapes like the outlines of the subjects. One thing I have noticed about the composition of all of these paintings is how Braque likes to layer things on top of each other, especially in “Houses at L’Estaque”. Each house sits on top of each other which gives it that depth of field and 3-D feel.