By using a white paint applied to the canvas I make a napkin. But I am sure the white shape is something conceived before knowing what it was to beco… - Georges Braque

What greatly attracted me – and it was the main line of advance of Cubism – was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still life's, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space. I wrote about this moreover 'When a still-life is no longer within reach, it ceases to be a still-life...'. For me that expressed the desire I have always had to touch a thing, not just to look at it. It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting – the quest for space.

Evidence exhausts the truth.

At that time I was very friendly with Picasso. Our temperaments were very different, but we had the same idea. Later on it became clear, Picasso is Spanish and I am French; as everyone knows that mean a lot of differences, but during those days the differences did not count... We were living in Montmartre, we used to meet every day, we used to talk.. .In those years Picasso and I said things to each other that nobody will ever say again, that nobody could say any more.. .It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together.