This month the spotlight will be on George Braque (13 May 1882 - 31 August 1963)

“Light is a delicate thing” George Braque

Born in May 1882, George Braque was a major 20th century French painter, printmaker, sculptor, draughtsman and collagist. George Braque’s first style of artwork was the ‘Fauves’ style – Fauves is a style of art that uses brilliant colours to represent emotional response, but Braque is most famously known for being one of the founders of Cubism, working closely with Pablo Picasso, although Picasso somewhat over shadowed Braque with his fame and notoriety.

George Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty ‘in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty the artist interprets their subjective impression’. He described objects shattered into fragments as a way of getting closest to the object, saying fragmentation helped him to establish space and movement in space, his monochromatic and neutral colour palette emphasizing the subject matter.

“Trees at L’Estaque” After George Braque’s early Cubism.