Georges Braque
Invented Cubism alongside Picasso, then spent forty years quietly not being him.
Georges Braque was born in Argenteuil in 1882 and trained as a decorator and house painter, which is where the marbling, wood-graining and lettering that turn up in his Cubist pictures come from. Between 1908 and 1914 he and Picasso worked so closely that their canvases of the period are sometimes difficult to tell apart; Braque introduced papier colle in 1912. The war ended the partnership — he was severely wounded at Carency in 1915 and trepanned — and the work afterwards moved into the sombre, tactile still lifes, the Gueridon tables, and finally the Ateliers and the birds, one of which he painted on a ceiling of the Louvre. He died in 1963.
The Cubist years are a small and heavily studied body of work and anything from them requires serious provenance research, including the wartime period. The later still lifes are the bulk of the painting market. Braque also produced a large printed output — etchings, lithographs and the Lettera Amorosa and Cahiers illustrations — much of it published posthumously or in the final years, so distinguishing lifetime impressions, signed editions and later restrikes is the first question with anything on paper. Vallier and Mourlot are the standard references.
If you own a work by Georges Braque
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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