Braque Quotes
Get all the information you can about the Cubists, and about Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Go to Kahnweilers' (Paris art gallery). And if he's got photos of recent works – produced after I have left -, buy one or two. Bring us [the Futurists in Italy, like Boccioni himself] back all the information you can get.
Umberto Boccioni
Colour came into its own with papiers collés.. ..with these works we [Braque, and a little later Picasso, started to make 'collage art', circa 1912] succeeded in dissociating colour from form, in putting it on a footing independent of form, for that was the crux of the matter. Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.
Georges Braque
And I learned very early [Josef Albers was then ten years old] how to make imitation of wood grain. This is something I have in common with Georges Braque. Braque also learned very early from his father how to imitate marble or wood grain. So I could easily make the appearance of oak or walnut on pine. That is very easy; a very simple technique. And I learned how to imitate marble. I never made such a good joke as Braque did. When he was in the Mediterranean he fooled his friends. He painted a rowboat that had wood on one side and marble on the other side. You see, when he'd row out of the city it looked as if he were in a boat of a different material than when he came back, you see, one side was imitation wood and the other side was imitation marble.
Josef Albers
Already, a conscious courage is coming to life. Here are some of the painters: Picasso, Georges Braque, Delaunay, Le Fauconnier.... they are highly enlightened, and do not believe in the stability of any system, even if it were to call itself classical art.... Their reason is poised between the pursuit of the fleeting and a mania for the eternal.
Jean Metzinger
When Jackson talked about painting he didn't usurp anything that wasn't himself. He didn't want to change anything, he wasn't using any outworn attitude about it, he was always himself. He just wanted to be in it because he loved it. The response in the person's mind to that mysterious thing that has happened before has nothing to do with 'who did it first'. Tomlin however, did hear these voices and in reference to his early work and its relation to Braque, I like him for that. He was not an academician of Cubism even then; he was an extremely personal and sensitive artist.
Franz Kline
When we did Cubist paintings [Picasso and Georges Braque, in their early Cubist period in Paris], our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets [a. o. Appolinaire and Cendral] followed our endeavor attentively but they never dictated it to us.
Pablo Picasso
Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard. Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque (in this quote Breton refers to the early collage art of the two Cubists, ed.) insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort. It is even permissible to entitle POEM what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers.
André Breton
..the highly abstract cubism of Mondrian - a Dutchman - (it is well-known that cubism has made its entrance into the [Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam...) though a product of cubism, Mondrian in no way imitates this style. He seems above all to have undergone the influence of Picasso, but his personality has been remained intact. His trees and his female portrait display a sensitive cerebral quality. This kind of cubism clearly follows a different path from that of Braque and Picasso, artists whose 'recherche de matière' [research of the material as matter, what Mondrian deliberately ignores]] is presently arousing such interest.
Piet Mondrian
