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