Artist Braque honored in an exhibit in Vienna

"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.400 mln euros insurance Some 80 works of art, insured for 400 million euros, 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.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. The retrospective, the first of Braque's works in Austria, runs until March 1, 2009.