The Magic Ray

France's generation of giants is becoming ancient. Fernand Leger is 71, Picasso past 70; Raoul Dufy is 75, Rouault 81, Matisse 82. Two months ago, another of the giants, white-haired Georges Braque, quietly passed his 70th birthday and calmly went about putting the last touches on his first exhibit in two years. Last week Paris got a chance to see Braque's new show and came away declaring that time had not yet dimmed the old master's artistry.

If anything, Georges Braque seemed to grow younger with years. Ranging the gallery walls were 32 paintings as fresh and varied as those of any young hopeful struggling to find a "style." There were clear Normandy seascapes, bright Fauvist landscapes, familiar cubist figures, tight abstractions, and soft, flowing still lifes. On some the color lay thin and gentle; on others it was heavily applied with a palette knife and sometimes thickened with furnace ashes. Two of the paintings spanned Braque's career. The idea for his carefully constructed Bicycle came to him at 17, but only later did he feel able to paint it. His Reclining Woman was begun in 1930 and took 20 years to finish.

Wrote Critic Guy Marester in Combat: "[Braque's show is] not a nostalgic resume, but the affirmation of a continuity." Said Christine de Rivoyre in Le Monde: "Never has his art appeared more young and vigorous."

Painter Braque does not like to be asked how he manages to stay young of eye. "There is only one thing in art,that is worthwhile," he says. "It is that which cannot be explained." Outwardly he is the same as ever, an even-tempered, meticulous workman sometimes called "France's first artisan." Though he is a wealthy man (half of his current show is already sold, at prices up to $30,000 a painting), he still rises at 6 each morning, puts in a full day sketching, painting, or just jotting down ideas. His pleasures are simple, a few dinners with friends, an occasional jaunt through southern France, and vacations at his seaside house in Normandy. Most of the time he can be found working at home, in a blue smock and sheepskin slippers.

Braque's mind runs in no such methodical groove. His notebooks are a whirlpool of ideas and feelings, some clashing, all spilling out in his work. "Technique?" he scoffs. "Of no importance. Color? Put it anywhere. It's the art of establishing relations that matters." He has few rules, but he places feelings ahead of ideas. "If I were able to do a painting mentally," said Georges Braque last week, "I would never bother to paint it."

Where does the feeling come from? Braque picked up a studio ashtray. "It's dead," he said. "But all I have to do is look at it in a certain way . . . You just sort of project a magic ray on to an object, and bring it into the enchanted circle."

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