Jewelry metamorphoses of Georges Braque

Georges Braque entered the history of art as the creator of a direction called cubism. He also came up with the idea that sheets of paper, newspapers, or boards could be pasted onto the canvas of a painting, and thus became the forerunner of the technique known as collage. He also began to decorate his canvases and graphics with inscriptions, chains of letters or numbers, which now seems natural. Then he was not.

Georges Braque was born in 1882 and studied painting at the academies of Le Havre and Paris. He worked on the theory of cubism together with Picasso, but few people know about it, today everyone associates Picasso with cubism, and Marriage is almost forgotten. He mainly created paintings and graphics, sculptures were created by only a few dozen over a sixty-year creative work.

In the early 150s, Baron Henri Michel Heger de Lowenfeld contacted Braque. He was not only a baron, but also engaged in the trade of precious stones, mainly diamonds. The Baron knew that Braque had created few sculptures in his life and made him an unusual proposal. He offered the master a very specific cooperation, which would consist in the fact that Braque would make a series of jewelry drawings, which are in the nature of small sculptural forms. Braque had to do projects, the baron had to do projects. Thus, an unusual collection was created. It was called "Metamorphoses" and after two years of hard work was shown at the opening ceremony at the Louvre, because Andre Maluro, Minister of Culture in the government of General de Gaulle, was personally involved in the project. XNUMX objects were shown, in which the minister saw decorations, and the baron saw sculptures. XNUMX objects were sold during the exhibition. It was the great culmination of the life and work of a great artist who died less than six months later.

After Braque's death, the collection was expanded by Heger, who owned it. In 1996, Heger transferred the copyright to Armand Israel, with whom he worked for over 30 years. The collection is on display at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and also travels the world. In 2011, several jewels were presented at an exhibition in Sopot, and in 2012 they were presented at the Forbidden City in Beijing.