Biography
A key figure in modern French painting, artist Georges Braque is chiefly remembered for his abstract art, notably his pioneering work on Cubism—one of the most revolutionary and influential movements of modern art—which he founded in the late 1900s in collaboration with Pablo Picasso.
Born 1882 in Argenteuil-se-Seine, France, the artist studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre and the Académie Humbert, where he fell into the milieu of artists that included Francis Picabia and Marie Laurencin. Rapidly transitioning from Impressionism to Fauvism, Braque was already an avant-garde painter before meeting Picasso. As his career progressed, his subject matter became more recognizable, and his palette lightened while re4taining the abstract dynamism of his early-Cubist works. Braque died on August 31, 1963, in Paris, France, at the age of 81.
At the center of Cubism was the question of how to convey a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional image, and the differences between reality and representation. Beginning in the 1930s, Braque used birds repeatedly to serve as a surrogate of this concept: to remind the viewer that what they are seeing is not real. Throughout his artistic career Braque’s birds became iconic; a symbol of peace, hope, and even perseverance in the aftermath of World War II. Over the course of the 20th century, the Braque bird represented the nature of art, hope for the future, and finally the artist himself.