Georges Braque (May 13, 1882 – August 31, 1963) was a French painter and sculptor, and with Pablo Picasso one of the inventors of Cubism.
Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France. He grew up in Le Havre and studied in the evenings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from about 1897 to 1899.
He studied in Paris under a master decorator and was awarded his certificate of craftmanship in 1901. The following year he attended the Academie Humbert and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.
His early work was impressionistic, but he soon changed to a Fauvist style. He was impressed by the bold style of work exhibited by the Fauves in 1905. They used brilliant colours and loose structures of forms to capture the most intense emotional response. The Fauves included Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.
In 1907, Braque exhibited works in this style in the Salon des Indépendants. From 1909 to 1911, he worked with Picasso to develop Cubism. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and papier collé. Their collaboration continued until 1914.
Braque was injured in the First World War, after which he moved away from the harsher abstraction of cubism, towards the hermetic and synthetic forms — the most abstract forms of cubism.
