Lot 37
Georges Braque
France, (1882-1963)
Doves and Fish in an Aquarium, 1950
etching on thick wove paper
Signed lower right, numbered 12/50 lower left.
Biography from the Archives of askART
The following was written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Georges Braque was born on May 13, 1882 in Argenteuil, France, where his parents ran a paint shop. He was brought up in Le Havre. His father was a house painter at that time, and he encouraged the boy's attempts to draw. Georges also took music lessons from Raoul Dufy's flutist brother, Pierre, which resulted in Braque's continuous love of music; he played several instruments.
A slow deliberate student, Braque accomplished nothing much until he became, at age twenty, the youngest member of the group known as the Fauves and first came into prominence in 1906 as a Fauve painter. However he was unhappy with his first canvases in the new style and subsequently destroyed them because they were too realistic for him.
With Orthon Friesz, an old friend from Le Havre, Braque went to Antwerp where he began to lighten his palette. In 1908, Braque produced his first Cubist canvases to which the lessons of Fauvism contributed.
Braque with Picasso was one of the founders of Cubism- that style of painting which became the dominant style for the first half of the 20th century. The twenty-five year old Braque visited the twenty-six year old Picasso in his studio in November 1907. There he saw the huge and shocking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Braque's responded: "It is as if someone had drunk kerosene to spit fire." Braque was called the moon to Picasso's sun in their partnership. Picasso had a healthy head start but after setting up in L'Estaque in the south of France during the summer of 1908, Braque took the lead. He solidified and refined cubism's multiple viewpoints and spacial ambiguity. The collaboration then began in earnest.
In appearance, Braque differed from Picasso. Braque was a tall stocky fellow; Picasso was short, but solid. Unlike Picasso's revolving-door sex life, in 1912, Braque found one wife, Marcelle Lapre, decided he liked her and stayed with her for more than fifty years. Like his paintings, Braque was a man of many facets. He was an avid swimmer, a boxer and a wrestler. He played the accordion; he drove speedy sports cars until age finally slowed him down; and he was known as a good dancer.
In 1914, Braque was drafted into the French Army. He was hit in the head on May 11, 1915 and was left for dead on the battlefield of Neuville-Saint-Vaast. After being picked up the next day by stretcher-bearers, Braque evidently underwent cranial drilling. Having spent two days in a coma, he recovered consciousness on May 13, his birthday. He had a long convalescence, mainly in Paris and Sorgues and did not work again until 1917. His wounds would affect him the rest of his life, apparent to visitors through a certain stiffness and slowness of movement.
More than Picasso, Braque remained faithful to Cubism throughout his long life, finding in its discipline and subtle color harmonies ample means to express what he saw and thought and felt. As a young man Braque had been an apprentice in the family house-painting business and had learned the craft of simulating in paint the grain of wood or marble. It is amazing how much Braque could achieve with a deliberately limited palette.
He also had a remarkable gift for light and was a born colorist, painting with sweet and intimate poetry. He was the purest painter of his time; never mechanized like Picasso, Gris and Leger. His still life occupy an honored place in the history of this genre in which homage is paid to assembled objects of everyday life. Braque developed a mastery of textured surfaces, together with carefully calibrated tones and patterns; he emphasized shapes by forcefully bordering them. In 1912 Braque invented the paper collage, in which scraps of newsprint and ticket stubs were glued onto the canvas.
A fun-loving circle of friends and followers formed around Braque and Picasso. They went to circuses, listened to Chinese music and played instruments ranging from the accordion to weird African drums. They collected African sculpture, odd glasses and nails.
- Dimensions: 12 1/8"H x 9 3/8"W (sheet), 14"H x 11"W (mat)
- Medium: etching on thick wove paper
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