Georges Braque

A French painter, born in 1882 and dead in 1963, who created Cubism together with Pablo Picasso in Paris between 1908 and 1914 — the movement that abandoned the single fixed viewpoint and rebuilt objects out of overlapping planes. He invented papier collé, the pasted-paper picture, in 1912. After a near-fatal head wound in the First World War he worked on alone for more than forty years, ending with the studio interiors and birds that are his late signature.

Both, together, and the question misses how they worked. From 1908 to 1914 they were in near-daily contact in Montmartre, deliberately holding back personal style in favour of a shared problem, and by 1911 their canvases are so alike that experts still argue over attributions. Braque's own image for the years was two mountaineers roped together on a climb. The specific inventions can be assigned — the 1908 L'Estaque landscapes that got the movement its name are Braque's, papier collé is Braque's, and the movement's other founding canvas, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, is Picasso's — but the movement is not divisible.

Papier collé — French for "pasted paper" — is a picture built from pieces of paper glued to the support rather than painted. Braque invented it in the first days of September 1912 at Sorgues near Avignon, when he saw a roll of wallpaper printed to imitate oak grain in a paint shop window, bought it, and cut it into a drawing. It was a solution to a problem: Cubism had grown so nearly colourless and so hard to read that a strip of fake oak brought material and colour back into the picture. Picasso adopted it immediately, writing to Braque that he was using his "latest paper methods."

Analytic Cubism, roughly 1909 to 1912, takes an object apart: a violin or a face is broken into small overlapping facets shown from several angles at once, in near-monochrome browns and greys, until the subject almost dissolves. Synthetic Cubism, from 1912 onward, builds an object up instead, assembling it from flat shapes and signs — pasted paper, stencilled letters, brighter colour, larger forms — in a picture that admits it is a flat surface.

Partly temperament and partly the war. Picasso changed styles restlessly for seventy years, courted attention, and lived until 1973; Braque was mobilised in 1914, took a head wound at Carency in 1915 that required his skull to be opened, and did not paint again until 1917. He never resumed the partnership, worked quietly for another four decades on a narrowing range of subjects, and disliked publicity. France knew what it had: the Louvre exhibited him while he was alive in 1961, and buried him at the state's expense in 1963.

The ceiling of the Salle Henri II, in 1953 — three panels of birds against a dark ground. It is one of the few twentieth-century additions to the decoration of the palace itself, and it made him a living artist installed in the building that holds the French national collection. The birds had emerged from his Ateliers series and became the motif of his last decade.

The Centre Pompidou holds the largest public collection of his paintings, including the 1908 L'Estaque landscape that helped name Cubism, the papiers collés of 1912–14, and La Sarcleuse, the canvas still on his easel when he died. The Louvre keeps his 1953 ceiling in the Salle Henri II, and the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris hold further works.