Between 1910 and 1912 Pablo Picasso and George Braque lived in Ceret, a small town in southern France near the Pyrenees. This two-year period is the focus of Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, a traveling exhibition appearing at the Kimbell Museum a century after the artists’ time in Ceret. A tightly focused show centering around sixteen paintings and twenty etchings and drypoints, the exhibition focuses on the collaboration and working processes of one of the most fruitful partnerships of twentieth-century art.

The exhibition’s purpose is not to highlight what we already know about these artists but to show a concentrated view of how they worked to remove everything they had previously been taught to perfect, including form, color and composition. The exhibition begins with a room hung entirely with prints.  These works, rendered in black and white, read as a blueprint for the paintings staged later in the exhibition. Of the twenty on view there are perhaps five to six scenes, suggesting that it wasn’t the subject matter that was of concern, but the construction.

Following the room hung with prints comes the exhibition’s main space, hung with sixteen oil paintings. Most of these paintings are unsigned, apparently because Braque felt these works were meant for personal artistic study rather than commercial consumption. Braque’s Still Life with Bottle and Glasses (1912) flattens a tabletop scene into an array of shapes and lines. These areas float in space, but also merge and combine with their neighbors, creating a network of shapes that may at first seem incomprehensible. Certain anchors draw in the audience however. Segments of words and fragments of the objects’ outlines entice viewers to search out and identify the objects that the painting supposedly depicts.

In the center of the main room is a late career portrait by Paul Cézanne, Man in Blue Smock (1896-97), a testament to the older artist’s influence on Picasso and Braque. Cézanne’s portrait, a study in broad brushstrokes and planes of color that only loosely adhere to the boundaries of the objects they describe, is a clear predecessor for Picasso and Braque. Both artists were deeply inspired by Cézanne’s fracturing of form and play with multiple perspectives. Excising color from their own paintings, they concentrated on experimenting with line, light and form.

At first glance the exhibition is somewhat disconcerting. The works initially seem strikingly similar with their muddy palettes and boldly-drawn angles. It’s a far cry from other big art exhibitions laden with visual excitement. Yet Picasso and Braque is successful for many reasons. Not only does it emphasize Cubism’s often hard-to-understand analytic phase, but it is arranged in such a way that this experimental period becomes accessible to visitors who don’t hold thorough art-historical training. The exhibition is challenging, but well worth the time.