Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque first met in 1907.
Their meeting took place in Paris, probably in October or November, after Braque’s friend Guillaume Apollinaire introduced him to Picasso. Braque visited Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, the Montmartre building where Picasso lived and worked. Braque had recently seen Picasso’s groundbreaking painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and was intrigued by its fractured forms.
The two artists soon became the central partnership behind Cubism. Braque’s 1908 paintings of L’Estaque and Picasso’s experiments with fragmented figures pushed painting away from traditional single-point perspective. By 1909, they were working closely, comparing ideas and producing pictures so similar that experts sometimes struggled to distinguish between them.
A common mix-up is confusing the date they met with the date their artistic collaboration became fully established. They met in 1907, began developing Cubism together mainly in 1908, and worked side by side especially intensely during 1911 in Céret. Their collaboration ended when Braque enlisted in the French Army in 1914.