"Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.", Georges Braque
Georges Braque (May 13, 1882 – August 31, 1963) was a French painter, collagist, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor, and, with Pablo Picasso, the co-founder of Cubism. Born in Argenteuil and raised in Le Havre, he was trained from boyhood as a house painter and decorator in the family business before pursuing fine-art studies in Paris. His early work in the mid-1900s aligned with Fauvism, but his encounter with the late paintings of Paul Cézanne and his subsequent meeting with Picasso in 1907 set him on the path that would change twentieth-century European art.
From 1908 to 1914 Braque and Picasso worked in the closest collaboration of any two major painters of the modern period, producing the analytic and synthetic Cubist paintings whose work, in those years, was very nearly indistinguishable. The First World War interrupted that partnership; Braque was seriously wounded at the front, and after his return to painting in 1917 his work moved away from the geometric austerity of high Cubism toward a softer, more lyrical idiom of brighter color, expressive line, and renewed engagement with the figure and the still life.
His later career was long and decorated. He was made Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur in 1951; in 1952–53, at the age of seventy, he completed the ceiling painting The Birds in the Salle Henri II of the Louvre, the first commission of its kind given to a living artist. His work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, and essentially every other major collection of twentieth-century European painting.