Georges Braque

Before Cubism had a name - before it even had Picasso - it was associated with Georges Braque. The movement gained its moniker from his 1908 painting Houses at L'Estaque. His work at this time is closely associated with that of his Spanish colleague, to the extent that the two artists occasionally struggled to tell their work apart. Although they soon diverged from this shared path, Braque went on to create an intensely poetic body of paintings and prints. 

As his career progressed, his subject matter became more recognizable and his palette lightened, while retaining the abstract dynamism of his early Cubist works. His paintings and prints are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others. His painting Paysage à la Ciotat fetched $15.8 million at Sotheby's New York in 2013.