In September the Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened what it describes as “the first to unite many of the paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque” during the two years that they worked alongside one another.

“During the years 1910 through 1912, Picasso and Braque invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a recognizable description of the real world—and toyed with them irreverently,” according to the museum.

“Following up on hints they found in the work of Paul Cézanne, and brimming with youthful bravado, Picasso and Braque created pictorial puzzles, comprehensible to a point but full of false leads and contradictions. Viewers pick up a few clues—a figure, a pipe, a moustache, a bottle, a glass, a musical instrument, a newspaper, a playing card—and these start to suggest a reality in three dimensions. The impression is that of a fast, modern world, with glimpses of models, friends, and the paraphernalia of drinking and smoking.

“But things never fully add up, either in detail or as a whole—and deliberately so. Teasingly elusive, the image is a construction of forms and signs that the artist has put together in a spirit of parody and play. The pleasure for the viewer is to let go of all normal expectations and enter into the game, which is an endlessly intriguing one.”

“Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912” runs through January 8, 2012 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, California, 805-963-4364, sbma.net.

Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer.