After Picasso and Matisse, Braque is the third man of modern art. Together with Picasso, he pioneered the greatest revolution in Western ways of seeing since the Renaissance, and if an ism’ can be said to be invented by a person, Cubism was invented by Braque.

In life, a combination of heroic soldier and Zen master, he seemed to survive everything even the shattering of his skull on the Western Front in 1915 but, in death, his story remains untold.

To reveal Braque, as Alex Danchev does here, is to revise Picasso and to illuminate one of the most influential figures in modern art.