Georges Braque
40 quotes
Biography
"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."
"Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny."
"I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. ..I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman."
"In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits."
"One must beware of a formula good for everything, that will serve to interpret the other arts as well as reality, and that instead of creating will only produce a style, or rather a stylization."
"The arts which achieve their effect through purity have never been arts that were good for everything. Greek sculpture (among others) with its decadence, teaches us this."
"The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact."
"In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits."
"Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise."
"Speaking purely for myself, I can say that it was my very acute feeling for the matière, for the substance of painting, which pushed me into thinking about the possibilities of the medium. I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually, though once a beginning had been made other discoveries follow. Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. For I suddenly saw the extent to which colour is related to the substance.. .So my great delight was the 'material' character which I could give to my pictures by introducing these extraneous elements. In short, they provided me with a means of getting further away from idealism in 'representing' the things with which I was concerned."
"Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. Trouillebert's work bears a likeness to that of Corot, but they have nothing in common."
"It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible."
"Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about."
"You see, I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence — what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry."
"Tactile space separates us from objects, as opposed to visual space, which separates objects from one another. I have spent my life trying to paint the former kind."
"By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to become. This means that a certain transformation has taken place.. .In a painting, what counts is the unexpected."
"To avoid a projection towards infinity I am interposing overlaid planes a short way off. To make it understood that things are in front of each other instead of being scattered in space."
"I am always working on a number of canvases at one time, eight, ten.. ..I take years to finish them, but I look at them each day.. .You see the advantage of not working from real life – the apples would be rotten long before I completed my canvas.. .I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part."
"I started above all by producing still-lives because in nature there is a tactile space, I would say almost manual."
"Picasso and I said things to each other during those particular years [c. 1908 -1913] that nobody would any longer know how to say, that nobody would be able to understand any.. ..things that would be incomprehensible, and which gave us so much pleasure."
"You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does, if you like.. .There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture."
"The whole Renaissance tradition is antipathic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cézanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this.. ..scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should."
"At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count... We were living in Montmartre, we used to meet every day, we used to talk.. .In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more.. .It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together."
"I felt dissatisfied with traditional perspective. Merely a mechanical process, this perspective never conveys things in full. It starts from one viewpoint and never gets away from it. But the viewpoint is quite unimportant. It is though someone were to draw profiles all his life, leading people to think that a man has only one eye.. .When one got to thinking like that, everything changed, you cannot imagine how much!"
"What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still life's, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I wrote about this moreover 'When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...'. For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space."