Objects as Poetics

By ROBERT HUGHES

The man was in the signature: seven rounded, erect characters, modestly impressed on the canvas, lettered rather than scrawled--nothing like Picasso's graphic flourish--and then underlined with two neat strokes: G. Braque. All his working life, from the early months of mottling, marbling and staining as a house decorator's apprentice in 1899 to the last grand studio in Varengeville with its sifting light and immense, airy still lifes, Braque liked to call himself an artiste-peintre; a phrase redolent of craft and self-effacement. For as an artist, he represented everything that his rival Picasso did not. The all-devouring ego, the protean skill of transformation, the sucking-dry of styles to find new masks for the self: none of this exists in Braque's work. It is, instead, measured, lucid, sublimated and calm: Braque was the greatest classicist of modern painting, and his work is a ratification of that maxim of Pascal's--"Le moi est haissable" (the ego is hateful).

Braque died in 1963. He was 81. Curiously, although America has been soaked in Picasso, there has not been an adequate museum show of Braque since the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted one a generation ago in 1949. On Oct. 7 an exhibition titled "Braque: The Great Years," organized by Douglas Cooper, opens at the Chicago Art Institute. It runs through Dec. 3, and will not travel; the rising cost of insurance and the growing reluctance of lenders to lend all but ensure that this will be the last major Braque show for years to come. It consists of 36 paintings (half from U.S. collections), representing what Cooper--a friend of Braque's and perhaps his most eminent scholar --regards as the man's finest work: the sequence of monumental still lifes and interiors that occupied Braque from the end of World War I to the middle 1950s. As retrospectives go, this is a smallish but highly selective collection.

In 1915, at Carency, Braque was shot in the head by a German bullet. He was trepanned and spent two years in convalescence. There was no brain damage, but he could not paint. A fracture had opened in his career. The young painter who had worked so intimately with Picasso on the development of Cubism before the war was now isolated from his own studio and from everything that went on in Paris. Instead of painting, he meditated; and the aphorisms he jotted down at the time--the first of many notebooksful--predict the future of his work in all its concreteness, density and modesty. Some of his jottings: "the limitation of means gives style, engenders the new form, and incites to creation." "The painter thinks in terms of forms and colors; objects are his poetics."

Cubist Fleshed. Granted this tenor of thought, it was inconceivable that Braque's kind of Cubism could ever have turned the corner into abstraction. Instead, his enterprise was to put flesh on the bones of Cubist structure, to give it the sensuousness of the world of objects, returning to the eye and hand a space which, though fictional, can be explored in real detail. "There is in na ture," he said later, "a tactile, I almost mean 'manual' space." The Mantel piece, 1922, is an example of this pro cess. At first one recognizes its elements -- the crumpled guitar, the bottle, the grapes, the brown veined marble of the consoles and mantel top -- as signs that "stand for" real things. But the painting, as always in Braque, is full of direct physical insistences: the weight and precarious balance of the clutter on the mantelpiece, almost toppling toward the eye, contrasted with the black void of the fireplace below. And the intricate composition of Braque's major canvases always acts as a way of distributing one's attention among objects as evenly as possible.

Later, it became Braque's habit to mix sand with his paint. The gritty paste, imbued with color and resistant to the skimming eye, served two purposes. It presented his paintings as surface; and it insisted upon a slowness of inspection, parallel to the immense deliberation which Braque himself brought to the act of painting. Such works are all about explicitness: witness a masterpiece like The Pink Tablecloth, 1938, with its assembly of waterjug, book, lemons and glass enjoying their mutual silvery transparency on a pale amoebic cloth, linked together by a shaved white line that both dictates the flow of the shapes and suggests the cold light of a winter morning.

Braque was not primarily a painter of the human figure; when one appears in his work, as in The Model, 1939, she is treated as an object among other objects; the light and shadow fall on the face as they might on a Braque jug, bisecting it, reducing it to a formula with out -- or perhaps beyond -- personality.

But if Braque's figures lack personality, his still lifes possess it. One finds a whole cast of characters: tables, for instance, run the gamut from the stolid turned legs under The Pink Tablecloth to the drowned and tilted marine landscape of The Billiard Table, 1944-52, to the iron legs of The Gueridon, 1935, flexing gaily like Isadora Duncan at practice.

Last Testament. That Braque was the greatest formal artist of the 20th century is hardly in doubt; nor have many painters since Piero della Francesca displayed such a perfect command over a complex pictorial structure. But in the process he made some of the most mysterious images in modern art: the series of studio interiors, with a white bird flying across them, that preoccupied him in the early 1950s and were his last testament. Their culmination was The Studio VIII, 1952-55.

The significance of the bird has provoked reams of interpretation. Is it an image of escape? Transcendence? Its importance to Braque was clearly immense. "Happiness starts when we cease to know," he said. "The bird is a summing up of all my art -- it is more than painting."

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