Georges Braque, the third man of modern art, is one of its last great mysteries. Picasso has an image, a persona, a legend. Matisse too. Braque seems immune to such treatment, unclassified. His work is his own, 'a new continent bearing no other name than that of its creator'. The Braque-world bears the stigmata of strangeness: 'a strangeness so entire as even to withstand the stock assimilations to holy patrimony, national and other', in the words of Samuel Beckett, one of his staunch admirers.

He is resistant to the stock assimilations. It is partly a matter of the company he kept, partly a matter of the distance he travelled. Braque is the only artist ever to sustain a creative partnership with the gargantuan Picasso. They were roped together like mountaineers (as Braque himself put it) in one of the great adventures of the twentieth century, the most momentous artistic collaboration of modern times.

Afterwards Braque went in search of himself, as Heraclitus prescribed. He cultivated a certain fatalism, a grain of superstition. His number was thirteen, the date of his birthday and his post-trepanation recovery day on the Western Front. He evolved what Nabokov called a bric-a-brac philosophy, which found characteristic expression in maxims that gained wide currency among Continental intellectuals, thanks to the uncredited adopting and adapting practised by the likes of Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge and Martin Heidegger. When Paulhan wrote of Camus, in 1963, 'there comes a time when life and art are one', he was imitating the conclusion of Braque's Cahier, or notebook, 'with age art and life are one'. And in the year of the artist's death, he was surely thinking of Braque when he added, 'Art, that which is easier to be than to define.' Braque invested heavily in being. 'Few people can say: I am here,' he reflected wisely. 'They look for themselves in the past and see themselves in the future.' Georges Braque had an almost mystical aura about him, but he was the least delusional of men.

He became le patron, the guru, the enlightener - detached, seclusive, inscrutable - master of the artless art. He had an affinity with Zen. Braque exemplifies the frequently noted paradox, more apparent than real, 'that those artists who are the most inventive, the most astonishing and the most eccentric in their conceptions are often men whose life is calm and minutely ordered'. He had no talent, he said, but the calmness of greatness. He called himself a painter. For other painters, young and old, he was the painter. 'After him, who?' asked Ozenfant. He was not merely influential. He had a much rarer distinction. He won for himself the kind of glory beautifully described by Paul Valéry: 'To become for someone else an example of the dedicated life, being secretly invoked, pictured, and placed by a stranger in the sanctum of his thoughts, so as to serve him as a witness, a judge, a father, a hallowed mentor.' Such a man was the talentless painter Braque.

Read more about Georges Braque: A Life