George Braques

Born in France in 1882, George Braque was the forefront of the revolutionary art movement of Cubism. Braque sought balance and harmony in his compositions, especially through papier colles, a pasted paper technique that Picasso and Braque invented in 1912. While their paintings shared many similarities in palette, style and subject matter, Braque stated that unlike Picasso, his work was “devoid of iconological commentary,” and was concerned purely with pictorial space and composition. His depictions of still life are so abstract that they border on becoming patterns that express an essence of the objects viewed rather than direct representations.  Braque stenciled letters onto paintings, blended pigments with sand and copied wood grains and marble to achieve great levels of dimension in his paintings