Georges Braque

Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil, near Paris, on 13 May 1882, and grew up in Le Havre, where his father and grandfather worked as house painters and decorators. He trained in that trade, learning to imitate wood grain and marble, skills that resurface later in his Cubist surfaces. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre and then at the Academie Humbert in Paris.

His first mature works were Fauvist, full of bright, unmodeled color, and he exhibited them at the Salon des Independants in 1906 and 1907. The decisive turn came in 1907, when he saw Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The two artists began an intense, almost daily collaboration that ran from roughly 1908 to 1914 and produced Cubism. In its Analytic phase they fractured objects into shifting planes; in the Synthetic phase Braque introduced papier colle, gluing cut paper and printed material onto the canvas, an innovation that opened the door to modern collage.

The partnership ended when Braque was called up in 1914. He was severely wounded in the head in 1915 and did not return to painting until 1917. His later decades were quieter and more lyrical: muscular still lifes, the great Ateliers (Studio) series of the late 1940s and 1950s, and a ceiling commission, The Birds, for the Louvre in 1953. He won the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and after Matisse's death in 1954 was widely regarded as the foremost living French painter. He died in Paris on 31 August 1963 and was given a state funeral.

The critical consensus on Braque is settled and has been for decades: he is treated as a foundational modernist, the co-author of Cubism rather than its junior partner. The complicating factor in his reputation is Picasso. Between 1908 and 1912 their canvases were so close that even specialists struggle to tell some apart, and the louder, more prolific Picasso came to dominate the public story of the movement, leaving Braque cast as the quieter half. Scholars have spent much of the last half century correcting that imbalance. The art historian John Golding, the leading authority on Cubism, championed Braque's later work in particular, arguing that the postwar still lifes and the Atelier series represent some of the most sophisticated spatial thinking of the twentieth century. The 1962 Louvre retrospective, the first ever granted to a living artist by that museum, was the institutional seal on his standing. Where debate continues, it is over emphasis rather than merit: how much credit for Cubism belongs to each man, and whether the market has ever fairly valued the more reticent of the two.

Braque's market is anchored by his historical importance but constrained by the relative scarcity of his very best Cubist canvases, most of which sit in museums. His auction high is Paysage a la Ciotat, a 1907 Fauvist landscape that sold for USD 15,845,000 at Sotheby's New York in May 2013. The figure is striking for what it implies: a founder of Cubism whose record is a fraction of the hundreds of millions paid for top Picassos and a level below several of his own contemporaries. The headline Cubist works rarely come to market, so prices cluster in the single-digit to low-double-digit millions for major paintings, with works on paper and the later still lifes far more available and far more affordable. The result is a market that is deep in supply at the lower and middle tiers and thin at the very top.

Braque offers an unusually clear case of canonical importance trading at a discount to fame. The existence of a full catalogue raisonne and a long, well-documented market history make authentication and provenance research more straightforward than for many twentieth-century names, and certificates of authenticity are the norm at the top of the market. Supply is the central fact to understand: the era-defining Cubist paintings almost never trade, so the visible market is dominated by later still lifes, prints, and works on paper that carry the name without the historical weight of the 1908 to 1914 period. For a collector, the practical question is less whether Braque matters, which is not in doubt, than which Braque is on offer, since the gap in value and durability between a landmark Cubist canvas and a routine later work is very wide.