Braque is occupied with quality, and finds salvation in a delicate and exquisite economy of means. Such learned execution confers a sort of magical interest on whatever he touches.
—Walter Sickert, 1924

I like the rule that corrects the emotion.
—Georges Braque, 1917

There are times when one despairs of the London art scene. The English seem to have such a voracious appetite for everything in art except serious painting. It’s not as if nothing has changed since Henry James, writing about an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1878, took note of the vulgarity, triviality, and what he called “that singular goodiness” that characterized so many of the works to be seen there. What has changed, however, is that the Victorian taste for “that singular goodiness” has now been supplanted by a contemporary taste for the disagreeable and the disgusting. Hence the extravagant praise and patronage for the likes of Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, and the Chapman brothers, not to mention Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. What hasn’t changed is, as James also wrote on that occasion, “that the plastic quality is not what English spectators look for in a picture, or what the artist has taken the precaution of putting into it.” What is wanted instead, as James observed, are pictures that “tell a story or preach a sermon.” The stories are now of a different sort, with that “singular goodiness” having yielded to a nostalgie de la boue, but the vulgarities and sentimentalities remain in place as an abiding cultural disposition.

On the other hand, it is in London at the moment—and not in New York—that you can see an exhibition of “Braque: The Late Works.”[1] For anyone with a keen interest in what James called “the plastic quality” in painting, Georges Braque (1882–1963) is an undeniable master. He is not, however, the kind of master that is very much in vogue nowadays on either side of the Atlantic. He was never political, preferring to steep himself in the quiet mysteries and ambiguities of poetry than to participate in the raucous world of public affairs. His private life was also not the sort that lends itself to publicity or mythification. He had but one wife, to whom he remained devoted, and in other respects, too, his “story” was steadfastly resistant to scandal or public notice of any sort. Except for the serious wounds he incurred as a soldier in the French army in the First World War, the principal events of Braque’s life were largely confined to his studio. In the later decades of his long career, it was indeed the studio that often served as the dominant “subject” of his art. It is not out of such undramatic materials that myths of the modern artist can be easily generated, and in Braque’s case none ever were.

No doubt it is the absence of such a myth that accounts for the generally lackluster and sometimes obtuse response that “Braque: The Late Works” has met with in the London press. None of the other reviews I saw was quite as hopelessly stupid as John McEwen’s in The Sunday Telegraph, which dismissed the exhibition as the work of “Mrs. Picasso,” but even the mildly approving notices failed to evince any real feeling for or understanding of the work on view. Without any showy display of sex, politics, scandal, or a frisson nouveau of any sort, the deeply pondered paintings of Braque’s last years were treated as the routine performance of an artist whose work could no longer be expected to interest the jaded tastes of the 1990s.

That reference to “Mrs. Picasso” in The Sunday Telegraph was, I suppose, one of the keys to this response. If such a remark means anything at all, it means that Braque’s place in the canon of modern painting is presumed to have been exhausted when his celebrated collaboration with Picasso in the creation of Cubism was completed on the eve of the First World War. Yet even if we ignore for the moment some of the great pictures that Braque produced between the two world wars, this is not a view of his achievement that is seriously sustainable in the presence of “Braque: The Late Works,” which concentrates on the paintings the artist created during the Second World War and in the years that followed.

In this exhibition, we are reminded— among much else—that in the masterpieces of his late work Braque was a far greater painter than Picasso was in his. If we compare some of the late works recently seen in the “Picasso and Portraiture” exhibition in New York with the “Atelier” and “Billiard Table” paintings in “Braque: The Late Works,” it is certainly Braque and not Picasso who is seen to have kept faith with the artistic standard set in the early Cubist paintings. To appreciate the difference, however, you have to be more interested in “the plastic quality” of the painting than in the myth of the artist’s life.

Braque was nearly sixty years old when France fell to the German army in 1940. “Not surprisingly,” writes John Golding in the catalogue accompanying the London exhibition, “Braque produced little in 1940, but in 1941 he resumed work,” and the pictures he produced in the war years tend, as Mr. Golding also writes, “to be austere, at times even tragic in their implications.” Neither this affinity for austerity nor his feeling for tragedy was ever again to be absent from Braque’s painting, and some of the paintings he produced after the war are, if anything, even more somber than his wartime pictures. What is never absent is the painter’s natural elegance—that gift of execution which, as Walter Sickert once wrote, “confers a sort of magical interest on whatever he touches.” But in the late works Braque’s elegance goes into mourning, so to speak, for a world that has been lost. What is gone is the sheer sumptuousness that characterized so many of the masterpieces produced between the wars, and in its place is an enduring accent of elegy.

The first of the late pictorial elegies that we encounter in the London exhibition is The Large Interior with Palette, or Grand Intérieur, of 1942. Mr. Golding calls it “the greatest of all Braque’s wartime canvases,” and speaks of “Braque’s unique ability to extract every nuance out of an essentially tonal palette of blacks, grays and fawns”—a palette that, with occasional recourse to more emphatic color, would continue to define his self-imposed regimen of pictorial austerity in the series of “Billiard Table” and “Atelier” interiors in the postwar years.

In none of these paintings are we given anything like a realistic account of Braque’s actual studio, of course. All are inventions of an imaginary secluded pictorial space in which the objects of the painter’s vocation are no sooner evoked than they dissolve into the spectral transparency of a nocturnal dream. Despite the multiplicity of objects to be glimpsed in these paintings, everything proves in the end to be illusory but the picture’s elaborately invented space and the somber poetic emotion it is created to convey.

It is not the least of Braque’s artistic audacities in these paintings that he was able to appropriate the conventions of the studio interior and the studio still life for the purpose of transforming them into the vehicle of an elegiac fantasy. There are few traces of the human figure in these paintings, and where such traces survive they are no more lifelike than the dissolving objects that crowd them for our attention. “Braque undoubtedly preferred objects to figures,” writes Isabelle Monod-Fontaine in another of the essays for the catalogue of the exhibition, and then adds: “but he was possibly even more attached to the representation of the spaces between objects.” That is surely another key to the “reading” of these elegiac canvases, and to the emotions they encompass. So is Madame Monod-Fontaine’s admonition that these paintings “do not reveal themselves at first glance, they need time and attention … they appear dark, hermetic and just as difficult to decipher as the analytical Cubist paintings of 1911–12.” As a consequence of this hermeticism, she finds in these pictures “a disconcerting capacity to elude the gaze,” but this, I have found, is a temporary obstacle that is easily overcome with sufficient time and attention. She also reminds us that the French are no more responsive to this work than I found the London critics to be: “it is smart in France,” she writes, “to gloss over the work that is the focus of this exhibition, the paintings of [Braque’s] last twenty years.”

Without glossing over anything in the exhibition, however, I have to confess that there is one group of pictures in “The Late Works” exhibition that continues to elude me—the group that Mr. Golding describes as “the final, valedictory ‘Bird’ paintings” that succeed the “Billiard Table” and “Atelier” series. In these pictures, it is not their hermeticism that I find to be problematic but just the opposite: their unwonted simplification and vacancy. It was inevitable, perhaps, that Braque would sooner or later seek to liberate himself from the cloistral, constricted space of the studio interiors before he put down his brushes forever, and there is no mistaking the fact that those final “Bird” paintings signified something of great importance to him. But whatever they may have signified for Braque, they strike me as an indulgence—an escape from the discipline and complexity that governed his greatest work. “I like the rule that corrects the emotion,” Braque famously said of his attitude toward art, and in the “Bird” paintings the emotion seems to have slipped the tether of whatever “rule” may have permitted him to carry his feeling to its requisite realization.

Far more successful, I think, and far more surprising, too, are the small, dour landscapes of those last years. These are the most melancholy paintings that Braque ever produced—imaginary pictures of familiar earthly sites that announce their author’s imminent departure from the world of earthly cares. Even more simplified in their formal conception than the simplest of the “Bird” paintings, they are irresistible in their sadness and their authenticity. Braque had begun his career as a landscape painter, and it was to these paintings of barren ground and unearthly light that he turned his talents in the end.

It will always be to the studio interiors and still lifes that we shall return in studying the late work of this remarkable artist. “People don’t take sufficiently into account the dark forces that impel us,” Braque observed in 1939, and the masterpieces he produced during the war and the postwar years are meditations on his experience of those “dark forces” in the waning years of his life. It is no longer in relation to Picasso that these paintings are now to be seen, but in the company of Alberto Giacometti and Samuel Beckett, especially the Beckett of Waiting for Godot, who, in the face of those “dark forces,” found themselves obliged to create an art appropriate to a world resistant to fixity and settled definition.

Braque had always brought a greater sense of gravity to his art than he was generally given credit for, and in another of the texts for the excellent catalogue of the London exhibition—Sophie Bowness’s fine essay on “Braque and the Poets”—we are given a salutary reminder of the extent to which the art of poetry shaped his thinking about art in these last decades of his career. The youngest of the poets whom Braque was drawn to in the postwar years was René Char, twenty-five years his junior, and in Ms. Bowness’s account of their collaborative projects we are given a better idea of the sensibility that Braque brought to his art in this period than is usually given to us in critical assessments of the paintings.

“Char’s aphoristic style and taste for concision were shared by the painter,” Ms. Bowness writes.  

Char admired Braque’s reflections on art, copying extracts from a Cahier at Braque’s home in 1948. Both loved the fragmentary, aphoristic writings of Heraclitus, and they collaborated on an edition of them in 1948, Braque contributing an etching and Char a preface. Both were also interested in the poetry of Pindar, and to Le ruisseau de blé (1960) Char contributed a translation and Braque an engraving.

There are indeed times when one despairs of the London art scene, but then it produces something like “Braque: The Late Works” and its fine catalogue, and we are reminded of how indispensable to the life of art London still is for us.

Notes
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“Braque: The Late Works” opened at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, on January 23, 1997, and remains on view through April 6. The exhibition will reopen at the Menil Collection, Houston, on April 25, 1997, and remain on view through August 31. A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by John Golding, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, and Sophie Bowness, has been published by the Royal Academy of Arts and Yale University Press (141 pages, $40). Go back to the text.