from a book review in the Guardian:

[likethebeer]

Georges Braque: A Life
by Alex Danchev
Hamish Hamilton
£35, pp464

Art historians fancy that Cubism was a series of conceptual experiments such as those that allowed Einstein to open up the fourth dimension; in fact, Danchev insists: 'Cubism was fun or it was nothing.' The orderly chaos of the canvases on which Braque and Picasso worked during those early years was a product of their pranks. They used the implements of art to play 'learning games and language games', mangling the words they included in their paintings or twisting them into puns, just as they took apart the single, frontal identities of their human subjects. Danchev likens the jarring, fractious surface of these works to a scrum. The image is exactly right, because sport, especially if it called for matey teamwork, was an analogy the painters favoured.

Picasso said that he and Braque were roped together like mountaineers. Braque, the bruiser, had a reputation as a pugilist and he and Picasso liked to impersonate professional boxers: it was a way of securing free rides in taxis. On other occasions, they pretended to be 'Buffalo Bill and his buckskin-clad sidekick, affectionately known as "pard" [partner]', or else they adopted nicknames that invoked the Wright brothers. They hung out at the aerodrome in suburban Paris, where they watched the offspring of Icarus challenge the sky inside contraptions of sticks held together by string and glue.
Peter Conrad.

This makes me feel as if, perhaps, Picasso would have been a better painter had he stuck to the fun stuff and not tried to be so serious.

I'm always happy when Braque gets a little attention. I root for the underdog.