VIENNA (AFP) — One of the greatest artists of the early 20th century along with Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque is being honoured with a major retrospective of his work in Vienna, 45 years after his death.
"There is no Braque museum and his works are dispersed around the world: it took us two years to find them in major museums, but also in many private collections," the director of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Ingried Brugger, told the press as the exhibition opened last week.
Some 80 works of art, insured for 400 million euros (508 million dollars), are on display, on loan from such galleries as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, the Guggenheim Museum and London's Tate Gallery, but also from art enthusiasts, who "until now jealously guarded their treasures," noted Brugger.
Braque was born on May 13, 1882 in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil-sur-Seine but quit school and moved to Paris in 1900, where he began taking art classes.
Inspired by his compatriot Paul Cezanne, Braque's first landscapes of L'Estaque and La Ciotat, in 1906 and 1907, welcome visitors to the exhibit with their vigorous lines and bright colours.
After discovering Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1909 at a gallery in Montmartre where he had accompanied the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Braque headed in a new direction, seeking to reproduce all three dimensions of his subjects on canvas.
This led to a five-year period of intensive cooperation between Braque and Picasso, during which the two artists created what came to be known as Analytical Cubism, toning down their use of colour and exploding shapes so that they appeared fragmented on canvas.
Together, they spent the summer of 1911 in Ceret, in the Pyrenees mountains of southern France.
"We saw each other every day and talked a lot, we compared our thoughts, our paintings and our techniques: whatever motivated us mutually, always bore fruit for the two of us, our friendship was always a win-win situation," Braque said of the partnership.
The bond became so tight -- Braque described the pair of them as alpine climbers on a rope, while the Spaniard referred to him as "my wife" -- that the two painters refused for a time to sign their paintings, a decision which still leads to confusions today, according to the curator of the exhibit, Heike Eipeldauer.
In 1912, during a one-month absence by Picasso, Braque, always on the look-out for new techniques, started experimenting with adhesive paper, after he found wallpaper with a wooden pattern in a shop.
With a few charcoal strokes and a sheet of that wallpaper, Braque would soon create his musical instrument pieces, such as La Guitare, in 1912 and 1913.
Upon his return, an enthused Picasso immediately adopted the new technique.
By integrating newspaper snippets over sketches of furniture, Braque also brought current affairs into his creations.
But 1914 saw him called up by the army, while his friend Picasso, a Spanish national, escaped the same fate.
Severely wounded in the head, Braque would not paint again until 1917.
But this difficult period is nowhere to be seen in his work.
"He never spoke of it, he processed this period on the inside and remained a man of harmony and beauty," the co-curator of the exhibit, Caroline Messensee noted.
For more than 25 years, Braque specialised in still lives with kitchen utensils, fruit, glasses and bottles, while developing a fascination for unexpected perspectives, "to achieve the fullness of an object", according to him.
He also experimented with sand, plaster and other materials on the canvas.
The only painter to be exposed in the Louvre during his lifetime -- his deep blue paintings "The Birds" grace one of the museum's ceilings -- Braque died on August 31, 1963 and was given a state funeral by then-culture minister Andre Malraux.
The retrospective, the first of Braque's works in Austria, runs until March 1, 2009.
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