Georges Braque

Braque and Picasso invented Cubism together, and Braque got less credit. He was quieter, less theatrical, less inclined to promote himself. He said they were 'like mountaineers roped together.' Picasso got the mountain named after him.

He grew up in Argenteuil and Le Havre, the son and grandson of house painters. He apprenticed as a decorative painter, learning to imitate wood grain and marble, techniques he later used in his Cubist papiers colles. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and exhibited with the Fauves in 1906, painting bright, loose landscapes influenced by Matisse.

Everything changed when he saw Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. He went to L'Estaque that summer and painted landscapes that broke the scenery into geometric facets, which is what a critic called 'cubes.' The name stuck. Between 1908 and 1914 he and Picasso worked so closely that their paintings from this period are sometimes difficult to tell apart. They showed each other everything. They finished each other's ideas.

The war separated them. Braque was severely wounded at Carency in 1915: a head injury that left him temporarily blind and required trepanning. He did not paint for over a year. When he returned to work, the collaboration with Picasso was over. They remained on good terms but never worked together again.

His post-war paintings are quieter, more resolved, less competitive. The Studio series, large paintings of the interior of his Normandy studio with birds flying through the space, occupied him through the 1950s. He died in 1963, at eighty-one. Picasso outlived him by ten years.