Georges Braque Quotes

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.

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.

The painting is finished when it has erased the idea.

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.

I started to introduce letters into my pictures [his first collage art]. These were forms which could not be deformed, because, being two-dimensional, they existed outside three-dimensional space; their inclusion in a picture allowed a distinction to be made between objects which were situated in space and those which belonged outside space [the letters].

If we had never met Picasso, would Cubism have been what it is? I think not. The meeting with Picasso was a circumstance in our lives.

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.

There are certain mysteries, certain secrets in my own work, which even I don't understand, nor do I try to do so.. ..Critics should help people see for themselves; they should never try to define things, or impose their own explanations, though I admit that if – as nearly always happens – a critic's explanations serve to increase the general obscurity that’s all to the good. French poets are particularly helpful in this respect.

What particularly attracted me [in his painting 'Still-life with Musical instruments', 1908 – 1909].. ..was the materialization of this new space that I felt to be in the offing. So I began to concentrate on still-life's, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space.. .This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them. It was this space that particularly attracted me, for this was the first concern of Cubism, the investigation of space.. ..In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life.

In art progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits.

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

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our [Braque & Picasso's, in the start of Cubism] conception of space.

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.

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.

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.