explored in real detail.

“There is in na
ART ture,” he said later, “a tactile, I almost
mean ‘manual’ space.” The Mantelpiece,
1922, is an example of this process. At
first one recognizes its elements — the
crumpled guitar, the bottle, the grapes,
the brown veined marble of the con-
soles and mantel top — as signs that
“stand for” real things. But the paint-
ing, as always in Braque, is full of dir-
ect physical insistences: the weight and
precarious balance of the clutter on the
mantelpiece, almost toppling toward the
eye, contrasted with the black void of
the fireplace below. And the intricate
composition of Braque’s major can-
vases always acts as a way of distribut-
ing one’s attention among objects as
evenly as possible.
Last Testament. Later, it became
Braque’s habit to mix sand with his
paint. The gritty paste, imbued with
color and resistant to the skimming
eye, served two purposes. It presented
his paintings as surface; and it insisted
upon a slowness of inspection, parallel
to the immense deliberation which
Braque himself brought to the act of
painting. Such works are all about expli-
citness: witness a masterpiece like The
CLUTTERED BALANCE Pink Tablecloth, 1938, with its assembly
Clockwise from below: Studio VIII , 1952-55; Houses at L’Estaque, 1908; of waterjug, book, lemons and glass
The Mantelpiece, 1925; The Gueridon, 1935; The Billiard Table, 1944-52; enjoying their mutual silvery transpar-
Braque – the greatest classicist of modern painting. ency on a pale amoebic cloth, linked
together by a shaved white line that
Objects as Poetics last major Braque show for years to
come. It consists of 36 paintings (half
both dictates the flow of the shapes and
suggests the cold light of a winter
The man was in the signature: seven from U.S. collections), representing morning.
rounded, erect characters, modestly imp- what Cooper—a friend of Braque’s and Braque was not primarily a painter
ressed on the canvas, lettered rather perhaps his most eminent scholar — of the human figure; when one appears
than scrawled—nothing like Picasso’s regards as the man’s finest work: the in his work, as in The Model, 1939, she
graphic flourish—and then underlined sequence of monumental still lifes and is treated as an object among other
with two neat strokes: G. Braque. All interiors that occupied Braque from the objects; the light and shadow fall on
his working life, from the early months end of World War I to the middle the face as they might on a Braque jug,
of mottling, marbling and staining as a 1950s. As retrospectives go, this is a bisecting it, reducing it to a formula
house decorator’s apprentice in 1899 to smallish but highly selective collection. without — or perhaps beyond —
the last grand studio in Varengeville In 1915, at Carency, Braque was personality. But if Braque’s figures lack
with its sifting light and immense, airy shot in the head by a German bullet. personality, his still lifes possess it.
still lifes, Braque liked to call himself He was trepanned and spent two years One finds a whole cast of characters:
an artiste-peintre; a phrase redolent of in convalescence. There was no brain tables, for instance, run the gamut from
craft and self-effacement. For as an damage, but he could not paint. A the stolid turned legs under The Pink
artist, he represented everything that fracture had opened in his career. The Tablecloth to the drowned and tilted
his rival Picasso did not. The all-de- young painter who had worked so marine landscape of The Billiard Table,
vouring ego, the protean skill of trans- intimately with Picasso on the develop- 1944-52, to the iron legs of The
formation, the sucking-dry of styles to ment of Cubism before the war was Gueridon, 1935, flexing gaily like Isad-
find new masks for the self: none of now isolated from his own studio and ora Duncan at practice.
this exists in Braque’s work. It is, in- from everything that went on in Paris. That Braque was the greatest formal
stead, measured, lucid, sublimated and Instead of painting, he meditated; and artist of the 20th century is hardly in
calm: Braque was the greatest classicist the aphorisms he jotted down at the doubt; nor have many painters since
of modern painting, and his work is a time—the first of many notebooksful— Piero della Francesca displayed such a
ratification of that maxim of Pascal’s— predict the future of his work in all its perfect command over a complex pictor-
“Le moi est haïssable” (the ego is hateful). concreteness, density and modesty. ial structure. But in the process he made
Braque died in 1963. He was 81. Some of his jottings: “the limitation of some of the most mysterious images in
Curiously, although America has been means gives style, engenders the new modern art: the series of studio interiors,
soaked in Picasso, there has not been form, and incites to creation.” “The with a white bird flying across them,
an adequate museum show of Braque painter thinks in terms of forms and that preoccupied him in the early 1950s
since the Museum of Modern Art in colors; objects are his poetics.” and were his last testament. Their
New York mounted one a generation Cubist Fleshed. Granted this tenor of culmination was The Studio VIII, 1952-
ago in 1949. On October 7 an exhibi- thought, it was inconceivable that 55. The significance of the bird has
tion titled “Braque: The Great Years,” Braque’s kind of Cubism could ever provoked reams of interpretation. Is it
organized by Douglas Cooper, opens at have turned the corner into abstraction. an image of escape? Transcendence? Its
the Chicago Art Institute. It runs Instead, his enterprise was to put flesh importance to Braque was clearly im-
through December 3, and will not on the bones of Cubist structure, to mense. “Happiness starts when we
travel; the rising cost of insurance and give it the sensuousness of the world of cease to know,” he said. “The bird is a
the growing reluctance of lenders to objects, returning to the eye and hand a summing up of all my art — it is more
lend all but ensure that this will be the space which, though fictional, can be than painting.” ■ Robert Hughes

66 TIME, OCTOBER 9, 1972 TIME, OCTOBER 9, 1972 67