This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ask a visitor to name the painter who invented Cubism and nearly everyone will answer Picasso. The historical record is less tidy. In the summer of 1908, working alone at the Provencal village of L'Estaque with no Picasso in sight, Georges Braque painted a series of landscapes that reduced houses and hillsides to blocky, near-monochrome geometric volumes. When the Salon d'Automne jury rejected them, Braque showed the work at a solo exhibition instead, where the critic Louis Vauxcelles dismissed it as bizarreries cubiques, bizarre little cubes. The name stuck to a movement whose founding canvas, by strict chronology, is Braque's own, not Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a painting most historians now read as a crucial forerunner rather than Cubism proper. What followed was not one man teaching another but, in Braque's own later description, two mountaineers roped together: for roughly six years the two painters worked in near-daily exchange, at times producing canvases so similar in handling that neither could later say with certainty which of them had painted a given picture first. Braque is also credited with the technical innovation, papier colle, pasted paper collage, that opened Cubism's final, Synthetic phase in 1912. None of this dislodges Picasso from art history; his subsequent fame, his six remaining decades of restless invention, and the sheer size of his output all built a reputation Braque, who worked more quietly and for longer in a narrower register, never sought to match. But the popular shorthand, Picasso invented Cubism, flattens a genuine two-person collaboration into a one-man myth, and it did so in Braque's own lifetime clearly enough that he pushed back against it directly, insisting the two of them had been, in the years that mattered most, inseparable.