George Braque (1882-1963) is an important figure in 20th century art in part for his exploration of central philosophical concepts like being and presence in his painting. Late in life Braque said that he was interested in painting “the space between things” — one reason that his work especially intrigued the philosopher Martin Heidegger. A retrospective of the French painter’s work, currently on view at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, provides an ideal opportunity to ponder these philosophical ideas while also exploring Braque’s development as an artist.

The retrospective begins with Braque’s Fauve (“wild beast”) paintings made between 1906 and 1907. In works like “Paysage de l’Estaque,” 1906, high-key primary and secondary colors are surrounded with white, emphasizing each hue’s intrinsic quality. The space in Braque’s Fauve canvases contracts as shapes battles for dominance. In the work of his contemporaries, painters like André Derain(1880-1954) or Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), the wildness of the Fauve palette results in an explosion; in Braque it results in a tense resolution.

Braque’s early Cubist work dates from 1908 to 1914, a time during which he and Picasso challenged each other, creating an idiom of representation that changed painting forever. In these Analytical Cubist paintings Braque’s palette is severely limited to warm and cool grays, whites and blacks. Line is used as a painting element and the visible world is transformed into planes and edges.

In “Le port (Fishing Boats),” 1908-1909, an early painting from this period, we still can identify objects. But as Braque’s ideas develop, his objects become subsumed by the imperatives of the composition. In “Soda,” 1912, for example, rhythm, pattern and movement take precedence over representation. Here we witness the beginning of Braque’s lifelong obsession with the interstitial experience — the space between things.

Braque served in The Great War and was badly wounded in 1915. He spoke of his convalescence as a time of reflection about painting and, in this exhibition, visitors can witness just how profound his thinking had been.

Starting with his return to painting in “La Musicienne,”1917-18, Braque departs from the limited palette and restrictive mark found in Analytical Cubism. In this canvas he paints with different hues and textures. The subtle blues, rusts and yellows of this painting anticipate his move into a more coloristic vocabulary.

In his paintings from the 1920s and 1930s of still lifes and Canéphores (ornamental maidens representing youth), Braque’s characteristic palette of deep green, sienna, black, white and gray emerges. A few of these mid-career paintings have notes of intense pinks and yellows, reminding us of his Fauve origins. But it is in the finely tuned, subtle earth tones and blacks that Braque really sets himself apart here.

Three vertical still lifes (an odd format for a still life), installed together on a wall, provide a unique opportunity to wander through Braque’s organic and balanced delineations of voids and shapes and to savor the hum of his carefully tuned palette, smeared paint and meandering line. The two Canéphores on a nearby wall remind visitors how different Braque’s earthy, rhythmic sense of the human figure is from Picasso’s relentlessly aggressive turned forms.

The exhibit concludes with the late paintings, made after 1937. They include all the major themes: the artist and model, the artist before his painting, the billiard table, the studio, and his archetypal bird and plow paintings. It is a strong, though limited, selection of a period of work in which Braque stakes his claim as one of the greatest painters of all time. “L’Echo,” 1956, and “The Studio (IX),” 1954, revel in the mysterious world of fragmented forms and flying birds that inhabit these late works.

Picasso is said to have stood in front of a late Braque studio painting in a collector’s house muttering “Je ne comprends pas,” “I do not understand,”—perhaps his admission that Braque goes some place where he could not? The late paintings here are complex and poetic. There is a palpable sense of things becoming, of space unfolding, of everything in flux.

“Georges Braque: A Retrospective,” through May 11, 2014 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas 77005, (713) 639-7300, www.mfah.org/exhibitions/georges-braque-retrospective/

More information about Patrick Webb’s work can be found at www.patrick-webb.com