Braque lived in a stronghold of modernism. In 1900, the year he moved to Paris, the Exposition Universelle took place, a showcase of research, technology, industry, art, and culture. Diesel engines, the first trolley bus, sound films, and escalators amazed the public. A main attraction was the Palace of Electricity, the illumination of which was generated by steam engines and dynamos. During the Exposition Universelle, the first metro line in Paris and two new railroad stations opened.

Research that would change the world was conducted in Paris. It was here that Henri Becquerel first observed radioactive radiation, and it was here that Marie Curie coined the term radioactivity. Like X-rays, which allow a glance inside the body, radioactivity was harnessed for medical diagnoses and therapies.

Acceleration and overcoming the limits of time and space were the promises of the future. Automobile and aviation trade shows in Paris demonstrated the new means of transportation. In August 1900, the first telephone line was switched between Paris and Berlin. Scientific and technological progress led to a new, dynamic view of the world, which also affected artists.

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were both avid moviegoers. The visual techniques of film opened up new horizons of perception and inspired modern painting. Georges Méliès, magician and cinema pioneer, amazed the audience with the novel stop-action technique and multiple exposures. The director Louis Feuillade had his film hero Fântomas change shape and walk through walls by means of crossfading.

Film set images of people, animals, and things in motion on the screen. Detached from their original location, they appeared in rapid succession, luminous and immaterial, disappeared again, and yet were entirely present. However, film not only shows bodies in motion, but also the gaze of the person moving through the world—with changes of perspective, acceleration, and fragmentation.

Not only was cinema immensely popular among the masses, but its radically modern “dynamics of seeing” also determined Cubism with its multiple perspectives, the fragmentation of pictorial objects, and the concept of pictorial space and pictorial light. And as in cinema, visual perception in Cubism was determined by a temporal sequence. Seeing became a process of cognition.

It is unclear when exactly Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who was just a few months older, met for the first time, but from the fall of 1908 onwards the two very different characters were bound by an intense friendship. For more than five years, the sedate Braque and the lively Spaniard visited each other almost daily in their respective studios, discussing art for nights on end.

Braque described the collaboration with Picasso as a “rope team on a mountain.” But who was the mountain guide? In the judgment of contemporaries and for a long time also of art history, it was Picasso, who was already much more famous than his friend. Yet it was the concentrated Braque who often took the first step. It was thus he who developed Analytic Cubism on the basis of landscape paintings and still lifes, invented the first “papier collé” in Avignon, and heralded the phase of Synthetic Cubism with material fragments and sand admixtures.

Braque and Picasso had common pastimes. Photos show them dressing up as mechanics or soldiers. They went to the cinema, the circus, and boxing matches every week. Picasso gave Braque the nickname “Wilbur,” the first name of the elder of the Wright brothers—aviation pioneers for whom they were both passionate. He signed letters to Braque with “Your partner,” in allusion to “Buffalo Bill,” whom Picasso greatly admired.