Georges Braque Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

Georges Braque
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Georges Braque
Truth exists, only lies are invented.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
The only valid thing in art is that which cannot be explained. To explain away the mystery of a great painting – if such a feat were possible – would be irreparable harm... If there is no mystery than there is no 'poetry', the quality I value above all else in art. What do I mean by 'poetry'? It is to a painting what life is to man... For me it is a matter of harmony, of rapports, of rhythm and – most important for my own work – of 'metamorphosis'

Georges Braque
Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

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

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.

Georges Braque
It is the act of painting, not the finished painting.

Georges Braque
Progress in art does not consist in reducing limitations, but in knowing them better.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape form one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong... If there is a touch of reaction, since life imposes that, it is minute. And then it is so difficult to judge a thing historically, separated from its environment: it is the relationship between a man and what he does that counts. That's what good and touches us.

Georges Braque
In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can't explain.

Georges Braque
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 form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Georges Braque
In art progress consists not in extension but in the knowledge of its limits.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
Few people can say: I am here. They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.

Georges Braque
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.

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

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

Georges Braque
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!

Georges Braque
Work to perfect the mind. There is no certitude but in what the mind conceives.

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

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque