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The formative early influence on him was the 1907 Cezanne retrospective in Paris. Cezanne's slow chewing at the motif, his persistence, his anxiety, his search for a sculptural grandeur in bodies and landscape (faceted on the surface, dense as limestone below) became, for Braque, a moral absolute. Cezanne's greatness lay in his "classical impersonality," opening a way to what Braque called the "total possession of things." A weakness of the Guggenheim show is that it contains none of the paintings from 1908-09 with which, at L'Estaque in the south and the village of La Roche-Guyon outside Paris, Braque dug himself into and then out of Cezanne. Nor does it have the clumsy but crucial Large Nude of 1908, in which he struggled to make sense of the shock of first seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. There is, however, the marvelous 1909 Harbor in Normandy -- a seascape of vectors, in which hulls, spars, water and sky are made of the same brown-and-blue prismatic substance, buckling in shallow space.
Braque's relation to Picasso in the making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso.
In Braque's cubism, the subject matter of Chardin -- a violin, a table, a pipe, a bottle, a printed page -- was born again into the fragmented world of the modern city, its silvery-brown light intact. The speckles in his cubist paintings became a fine-tuned vibrato, unlike the more assertive planes of his partner. This made coherent form melt more readily toward abstraction, which Braque did not want. Rather, as he put it, he wanted to "take the object and raise it high, very high."
To avert this problem he resorted to collage: scraps of newsprint or wallpaper pasted into the picture. This technique, so fundamental to modern art, seems to have been Braque's invention and not Picasso's. He made the first papier colle in 1912, Picasso following a week later. Moreover, Braque had been a house painter's apprentice and thoroughly understood the techniques of wood graining and false-finishing. He could reproduce a "real" fragment of a room, a table, a still life at will, whenever the image needed to be brought back to flatness and density out of the jumble of ambiguous signs.