Georges Braque Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

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

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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].

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and give impulses to creation.

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

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

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
The painting is finished when it has erased the idea.

Georges Braque
The subject is not the object; it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.

Georges Braque
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.

Georges Braque
... when objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909; this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.

Georges Braque
I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..

Georges Braque
When we were so friendly with Picasso, there was a time when we had difficulty in recognizing our own pictures. Later, when the revelation went deeper, differences appeared. Revelation is the one thing that cannot be taken from you. But before the revelation took place, there was still a marked intention of carrying painting in a direction that could re-establish the bond between Picasso and ourselves.

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

Georges Braque
Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord, they were born on the canvas; that is why it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.

Georges Braque