Nick and Braque

 My friend, Nick chunneled over for a visit.  Last year, he and Ernestos visited at the same time and we visited the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Grand Palais.  I decided we should check out Braque, which is the current show at the Grand Palais.

  Georges Braque  began his career as a Fauvist.  He used bright colors to express emotion.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, he only stuck with this for a year or two.

 For most of his life, like his good friend Picasso, he adopted a cubist style.  Many of his paintings are dark and without color, he believed he needed to strip the paintings of color to get to the essentials of form.  According to Wikipedia: In May 1907, he successfully exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants. The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne, who had died in 1906, and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism.

 Braque invented the Papier collé technique

(French: pasted paper or paper cut outs) is a painting technique and type of collage. With papier collé the artist pastes pieces of flat material (paper, oilcloth, newspaper) into a painting in much in the same way as a collage, except the pasted pieces are objects themselves

Christmas cards from Braque to friends

 Braque suffered a serious head injury in WWI that left him temporarily blind.  It took him a couple of years to recover completely, but when he did he continued to paint.

 Braque became very famous in France and was the first modern artist to have a show at the Louvre.  He was also asked to paint the ceiling in the Louvre, something no modern artist had ever been asked to do before. 

Time Magazine,  

Monday, Mar. 16, 1953

Of the artists who decorated the ceilings in Paris' famed Palais du Louvre, the two best remembered are the 19th century masters Ingres and Delacroix. Last week news leaked out that a third big name is about to be added. France's spry old (70) Georges Braque, currently breaking new ground with a show of his latest (and surprisingly airy) paintings in Manhattan, has recently been asked to design a large ceiling for the Louvre's ornate Salle Henri II.
Just what Braque has in mind for the Louvre no outsider knows. The Louvre itself would only confirm that Painter Braque "has been approached....

 

 We crossed the street to have coffee a the Petit Palais. 

The Petit Palais is a lovely museum and it is free.  It is a Paris museum and it has a little bit of almost everything.