L estaque 1906 georges braque biography

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In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly impacted the direction that the avant-garde in Paris took, leading to the advent of Cubism. Actually, it is a compositional scheme typical of Claude Lorrain's landscapes, with masses of trees on the right and the left, framing, as if they were theatre backdrops, a distant scene with the horizon blurred by the bright light.

Their productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army, leaving Paris to fight in the First World War.

French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or "bizarre cubiques", in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque.

After meeting in October or November 1907, Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he came under the strong influence of Paul Cézanne, who died in 1906, and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907.

During his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris. None of the landscapes painted by Braque in L'Estaque shows this scheme as clearly as the picture we are analysing, and none of them is so close to Matisse's masterpiece in the colour choice and the lineal rhythm of the tree branches.

Braque kept this painting for many years and it still belonged to him when it was included, with six others, in the special room reserved for the fauve painters in the Venice Biennale of 1950.

Braque's paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. From then on he joined the fauves group.

A decisive moment in its development occurred during the summer of 1911, when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret, in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult - sometimes virtually impossible - to distinguish from those of the other.

In October Braque and Friesz went to L'Estaque, a small town with a fishing port near Marseilles, which had already been depicted by Cézanne in last decades of the 19^th century. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now called Analytic Cubism. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense emotional response.

Braque's work is in most major museums throughout the world. The stylistic comparison of these two paintings leads us to think that the one we are analysing must have been previous to the Copenhagen version. Working alone, he developed a more personal style, characterized by brilliant color and textured surfaces and following his move to the Normandy seacoast the reappearance of the human figure.

The greatest artists of their time were invited to contribute to the project of a house for the Organization's Member States. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia. He described it as 'full of little cubes', after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. He showed this in the oil painting "House at L'estaque".

Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In June Friesz and Braque travelled to Antwerp, where they painted together a series of landscapes which, as far as Braque is concerned, can be considered the real beginning of his fauve period.