Georges Braque Quotes

The painting is finished when it has erased the idea.

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.

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.

Colour came into its own with papiers collés.. ..with these works we [Braque, and a little later Picasso, started to make 'collage art', circa 1912] succeeded in dissociating colour from form, in putting it on a footing independent of form, for that was the crux of the matter. Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.

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.

I started above all by producing still-lives because in nature there is a tactile space, I would say almost manual.

Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise.

I will try to explain what I mean by metamorphosis. For me no object can be tied down to any sort of reality. A stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach or anything else you like.. ..when you ask me whether a particular in one of my paintings depicts a woman's head, a fish, a vase, a bird, or all four at once, I can't give you a categorical answer, for this 'metamorphosic' confusion is fundamental to the poetry.

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.

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 would say that it was 'poetry' which distinguishes the cubist paintings which Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting which those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.

We [ Picasso and Braque], were living in Montmartre, we saw each other every day.. ..We were like two mountaineers roped together.

One day I noticed that I could go on working art my motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me.

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.

It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.