'Brilliant intellect, lucid spirit, Braque knows how mysterious creation is. In all his vision he seeks not only to penetrate this mystery, but to preserve it…In between maximum and maximum are his sketches, tumultuous or reduced to essentials, spontaneous notations or intense research, caprices of mind, caprices of hand; in them all one can trace from step to step, the reactions of his genius to this or that simple object. An object of everyday life, miraculous enough: vase, plant, table, coal-scuttle, a woman’s profile, all-absorbing and obsessive, to be seized upon and deformed and reformed, destroyed indeed and resuscitated from its destruction in that no less real and valid shadow, the form we shall see in a painting'. Jean Cassoulet, preface in Braque, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Henry R. Hope and William S. Lieberman, 1949, pp. 7-8