Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Georges Braque

The Late Works

Braque and Picasso. Picasso and Braque. The two names will be for ever yoked together in the history of twentieth-century art — a fact that is, curiously, to Braque’s detriment. Picasso’s reputation is so refulgent that his partner in what was the greatest revolution in painting since the Renaissance is inevitably somewhat obscured. Braque is the Shelley to Picasso’s Keats; the Gene Kelly to Picasso’s Fred Astaire; the McCartney to Picasso’s Lennon. The comparisons are not wholly facetious — they illustrate a genuine anomaly that often arises in the vexed and complex question of Reputation. The work that Braque accomplished after Cubism is, broadly speaking, almost unknown. The odd image of a bird, a still life or two may linger in the memory. But, outside the circles of connoisseurship, who is familiar with the great sequence of studio interiors painted through the late forties and the fifties? Or the small, charged, late landscapes whose intensity rivals that of Van Gogh? This superb show at the Royal Academy should, at the least, do something to rectify that ignorance; at best it will reconfirm Braque as an artist of the very first rank, with a character and adamantine integrity that are unique.

The show concentrates on the work of the last two decades of Braque’s life (he died in 1963) but it is worth considering Cubism as a starting point. In the few years after 1909, as Picasso and Braque simultaneously assaulted the north face of pictorial representation. It is fair to say that each had his period as trailblazer, but it can be fairly convincingly argued that it was Braque who made the most significant contribution, that Picasso seized on ideas that Braque introduced—papier collé, woodgraining techniques, the introduction of lettering, say — and gave them his own special spin. What this show makes absolutely clear, however, is that the revolution they both inaugurated in those few momentous years provided the aesthetic that was to drive Braque’s work from then on until the end of his life. Picasso returned in 1918 to classical figuration, but for Braque the essential Cubist principles of representation — the still life the dominant subject, use of multi-view perspective, the “celebration” of two dimensionality, analysis of space and relationship between objects within that frame — remained his artistic touchstones. They were elaborated, transformed and developed with a dogged consistency throughout the work that followed in the decades after the end of the First World War and Cubism’s great phase.

This doggedness, this singlemindedness in Braque reminds me of another genius and near contemporary, Paul Klee. Like Braque, Klee spent his life perfecting and refining his art with a concentration and devotion that is almost heroic. It is their attitude of mind that is similar rather than their output (though both were amongst the century’s greatest colourists). Intriguingly, they both found a form of epiphanic serenity in that fervent and solitary focus. Braque said in an interview late in his life that “objects don’t exist for me except insofar as a rapport exists between them or between them and me. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence … Life then becomes a perpetual revelation.” Klee wrote in his journal: “Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient … the world [is] my subject even though it [is] not the visible world.”

The genuineness of this sort of transcendence is only established by the quality of the work that it produces. There is a profound beauty in Braque’s canvases as well as a distinct gravitas. This last note is often struck by the extraordinary way he uses black — a facility matched only by Matisse. Black becomes, paradoxically, a rich colour amidst the other hues. In a painting such as Le Chaudron the canvas is almost 50 percent black. But its sombreness is offset by the palest of blues and lemony creams. I cannot think of any other artist who can modulate such extremes of colour tone with such seductively harmonious results.

Towards the end of his life Braque’s work came full circle. His career started as a Fauvist — with vivid, astonishing landscapes — and his final period sees him quit the interiors he so loved — the secular cathedral of the artist’s studio — returning to en plein air representation. These small, often horizontally elongated landscapes of extreme simplicity are loaded with powerful emotion. Heavy with impasto, frequently painted with a palette knife rather than a brush, the paintings of flat Normandy fields or beach scenes carry an astonishing freight of foreboding, and memento mori—though it is hard exactly to pinpoint why. Unlike Van Gogh’s tormented cypresses or swirling skies there is no one element here that can be designated disturbing. But disturb they do, with remarkable force, but in a way that is stoical rather than demented, resigned rather than terrified or despairing. As a coda to a life’s work of remarkable consistency and artistic excellence they serve to underwrite both this artist’s greatness and his humility.

1997