Georges Braque (Modern Masters Series, Band 14) - Softcover

Karen Wilkin, the author of Abbeville's Stuart Davis and David Smith.

INTRODUCTION

Georges Braque is one of the best-known and least-understood painters of our century, a paradigmatic modernist who only now, more than a quarter-century after his death, is beginning to be evaluated accurately. Characterized variously as radical innovator or elegant stylist, as serene classicist or temperamental individualist, as Picasso’s sidekick or as the grand old man of French painting, Braque has lacked neither attention nor admiration. Since at least the 1920 he has been regarded as an essential figure in the evolution of art in our time. Art history texts and museum installations have underlined their role as a vital collaborator in the modernist adventure, stressing, in particular, his intimate relationship with Pablo Picasso during the formative years of Cubism. The two artists’ works are hung side by side more often than not, and the phrase “Picasso and Braque” recurs as though it stood for a single being. Braque himself may have encouraged the idea when he said that he and Picasso were “roped together like mountain climbers” during those crucial years, and there are famous stories told by each artist about mistaking the other’s work for his own. While this has assured Braque’s place in the history of twentieth-century art, it has made him seem less interesting and less important in his own right, and his real individuality and real strengths have not always been fully appreciated.

Conversely, if being linked with Picasso has in some ways diminished Braque, his position in his later years as elder statesman of French paining sometimes led to his work’s being esteemed beyond its worth. Braque is unquestionably one of the giants of modern painting, but he produced many failed or weak pictures, often at the same time that he was making masterpieces. Problematic works occur more frequently toward the end of his life, when he was ill and feeble, but it is undeniable that at intervals after the late 1910s he produced ingratiating but second-rate works—pleasant but distinctly minor still lifes, tentative sculptures, uninspiring prints—that undiscriminating collectors have nonetheless found attractive. Acute eyes have always been able to distinguish between Braque’s best and lesser works, but the uncritical acceptance of secondary efforts has done little to enhance his reputation. Yet when Braque fails, he does so primarily in relation to the high standard set by his own finest work, and it is by his own highest level that he must be judged.

Braque is so clearly one of this century’s great painters—quite apart from his historical importance—that it is sometimes difficult to remember that he never laid claim to the popular imagination. He was a quintessentially unspectacular artists’ artist who led a life of exemplary dullness. There was no familial resistance to his wish to be a painter, no years of acute deprivation or struggle for recognition, no flight to exotic parts, no severed ear. Instead, there are charming anecdotes about his sturdy good looks, his prowess as an amateur boxer, his strength and athleticism. He is reported to have been a good musician, a singer with a pleasant voice, and an accomplished, enthusiastic dancer. Photographs and the recollections of his contemporaries bear out these legends. Braque’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, remembered that he boasted of being able to “play Beethoven symphonies on the accordion.”

Perhaps even more than his musical ability and his strength, Braque’s looks seem to have impressed everyone. Kahnweiler described him as tall, “very handsome,” and “a complete dandy.” “In those days,” Kahnweiler recalled, “he used to wear very simple blue suits with a special cut, which I never saw on anyone but him. He also had black, square-toed shoes that did not have a thick sole, which he said came from Abbeville. Like Max Jacob, he had a black string tie, and he wore all this with a great deal of chic.” Gertrude Stein’s companion, Alice B. Toklas, recalled that when she first met Braque, his robust appearance and carefully chosen workman’s clothes “reminded her so much of an American cowboy that she always had the impression he could understand English, and so was careful in what she talked about.” Braque remained impressive. People who knew him in his old age remember him as “the best looking man in Paris,” with his clear-cut features and silver hair.

From recollections and anecdotes a portrait emerges of a cheerful, energetic artist, but the persona suggested by Braque’s paintings is rather different. He appears to be intensely serious, disciplined—especially in comparison to the mercurial Picasso—relentless in his determination to see his paintings through to the end, meticulous about the physical quality of his pictures. In interview Braque often said that he “always had a feeling for painting,” insisting that he never chose to be an artist but came to it inevitably. “I never had the idea of becoming a painter any more than I had the idea of breathing,” he once said. Yet curiously, he seems to have been anything but a natural, neither a virtuoso draftsman nor, at first, a notable colorist. Despite this apparent lack of early distinction, Braque was encouraged by his family, and by the time he was twenty-two, he had declared himself a full-time artist. Two years later he was exhibiting in the 1906 Salon des Independants for the first time, and a year later, in his second appearance at the show, he sold all six of his submissions. By the time of his first one-man show, at Kahnweiler’s new Paris gallery in 1908, Braque was already part of the circle of artists and writers we now regard as creators of some of the most advanced and provocative art of the early twentieth century—individuals whose work helps to define what we mean by modernism. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a rapturous introduction to Braque’s exhibition catalog. In spite of Apollinaire’s and Kahnweiler’s enthusiasm, Braque’s commercial success at the 1907 Salon de Independants was not repeated (nor would it be for many years), but he had already begun to attract the attention of a few enlightened observers.

Just as Braque’s early years lack the struggles of the misunderstood artist celebrated in fiction—except, of course, for private self-imposed aesthetic struggles—so, too, is novelistic romance lacking. There is no succession of discarded mistresses in his history, no litigious offspring. Braque married Marcelle Lapre when he was thirty and they remained together, childless, until the end of his life, more than half a century later. All but the first dozen years of their married life were spent in the substantial house and studio, designed by the architect Auguste Perret, that Braque had built on a quiet cul-de-sac (now called rue Georges Braque) near the Parc Montsouris, in Montparnasse. Summers were spent at their house in Varengeville, on the coast of Normandy.

Except for one dreadful incident when he served in World War I, Braque’s life was devoid of conventional drama. Having suffered a severe head wound, First Lieutenant Braque was left for dead on the battlefield. Rescued by stretcher bearers the next day, he remained in a coma for several days, recovering consciousness on his birthday. He is reported to have lost his sight temporarily, and from then on there were no more stories about Braque’s extraordinary strength (although there is a photograph of the painter standing on his head, at the beach, in 1924). For undergoing this ordeal Braque was awarded the Croix de Guerre and made a chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur.

The greatest...