Why was George Braque a noted cubist when it came to his art work?”
Braque’s paintings of 1908–1913 began to reflect his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, appearing to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. In this way, Braque called attention to the very nature of visual illusion and artistic representation. Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso, who had been developing a similar approach to painting. Pablo Picasso was influenced by both Cézanne and African tribal sculpture, while Braque was mostly interested in developing Cézanne’s idea’s of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908
A decisive moment in its development occurred when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret, in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult sometimes virtually impossible to distinguish from those of the other. Their productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 when Braque enlisted in the French Army. French art critic Louis Vauxcelles first used the term Cubism, or “bizarre cubiques”, in 1908 after seeing a picture by Braque. He described it as ‘full of little cubes’, after which the term quickly gained wide use although the two creators did not initially adopt it. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described cubism as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture – that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” The Cubist movement spread quickly throughout Paris and Europe.
