FANTASTIC EARLY ORIGINAL FRENCH ANTIQUE MODERN LITHOGRAPH BY REVERED FRENCH PAINTER GEORGES BRAQUE. (France 1882-1963).

THIS WORK DEPICTS A GROUP OF TABLEWARE BRILLIANTLY RENDERED IN THE MODERNIST STILL-LIFE CUBISM STYLE. SIGNED IN THE PLATE. EARLY EXAMPLE DATING AROUND THE 1950s. GOOD OVERALL CONDITION.

DIMENSIONS: 36” W x 28” H

DIMENSIONS WITHOUT THE BACK FRAME: 29” W x 22” H

GEORGES BRAQUE (French 1882-1963)

Born: 1882 - Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France

Died: 1963 - Paris, France

Known for: Cubist interior and still-life painting, collage, lithography

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.

Museums:

Boca Raton Museum of Art (Boca Raton, FL)

Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, CUNY (Flushing, NY)

J. Paul Getty Museum and Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA)

Kresge Art Museum (East Lansing, MI)

Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis, MN)

Musee D'Orsay (Paris, France)

Musée du Louvre (Paris, France)

Musee National d'Art Moderne Pompidou (Paris, France)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA)

Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York City, NY)

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (Washington, DC)

National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Ontario, ON)

Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY)

Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy)

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives (Philadelphia, PA)

Portland Art Museum, Oregon (Portland, OR)

Print Club of Albany (Schenectady, NY)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) (San Francisco, CA)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York City, NY)

Tate Modern/Tate Gallery, London (London, United Kingdom)

The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK)

Washington County Museum of Fine Arts (Hagerstown, MD)