The other half of Cubism
Everyone remembers Picasso. But Cubism took two people, and the other one matters just as much. Georges Braque was a Frenchman from near Le Havre on the Normandy coast, the son of a house-painter and decorator — a trade he was apprenticed to before he turned to fine art. That ordinary detail will matter later: Braque was trained to imitate wood grain and marble on plaster, the honest tricks of a decorator, and he never forgot them.
He had first made his name as a Fauve — one of the “wild beasts,” a short-lived movement of painters whom critics mocked, around 1905, for their raw, deliberately unnatural color. Then in 1907 he saw the Demoiselles in Picasso’s studio, was appalled and gripped in equal measure, and within a couple of years had thrown the color overboard and joined Picasso in the most demanding experiment in modern art. If Picasso was the showman with the wild ideas, Braque was the patient builder who turned them into a coherent style.
Two studios, one experiment
Through 1909 and 1910 Picasso and Braque lived near each other on the Montmartre hill in Paris and visited almost daily, checking each other’s canvases and pushing the same problem one step further each time. “It was like being roped together on a mountain,” Braque said later. They worked so closely that, for a while, they stopped signing the fronts of their pictures — and scholars still argue over who painted what. Violin and Jug is Braque at the very top of that climb.