Braque ... despises form and reduces everything, landscapes, and figures and houses, to geometrical patterns, to cubes."
With this comment in 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term Cubism. He was responding to a solo exhibition by Braque of his earliest Cubist paintings, known as the L'Estaque landscapes.
Braque was born on 13 May 1882 at Argenteuil, outside Paris. In 1890 his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. He attended art classes, but when he left school in 1898 he was apprenticed to a house painter, the trade of his father and grandfather. He completed his apprenticeship in Paris, all the while continuing art evening classes. After compulsory military service, he attended art college in Paris, the Academie Humbert.
In 1904 Braque set up his own studio, first exhibiting in 1905 at the Salon des Independants. At this exhibition there was a room devoted to the work of the Fauvist painters; by 1907 his work was fully Fauvist and attracting acclaim. Two things changed his painting: a memorial exhibition held for Cezanne and meeting Picasso.
By 1909 Braque and Picasso had formed an alliance, which was broken by the First World War. Their work to 1911 is known as Analytical Cubism, in which they avoided strong subjects and colors in favor of subdued palettes and neutral subjects. Multiple-point perspective was used to show the object from various sides, not just from a fixed point, with the viewer expected to 'reconstruct' the item.
His work from 1912 is called Synthetic Cubism, in which planes are arranged decoratively, with the subject more recognizable. In the 1950s his health deteriorated and painting became difficult; he started making lithographs with simplified imagery and Fauvist colors. He died in Paris on 31 August 1963. He is credited with introducing typography, wood-graining, and marbling into Cubism.
