Exhibitions 1
Braque: The Late Works (Royal Academy, till 6 April)
Meditative calm
Martin Gayford
Across many of Georges Braque's later works there flaps a huge bird. It means nothing, according to the artist. It simply `materialised' on the canvases — a surpris- ing manifestation in the oeuvre of a painter whose major preoccupation had previously been still life. But without symbolic signifi- cance though it might be, the bird is one of the elements that add a dimension of strangeness, a depth of mystery, even a hint of transcendence, to the artist's magnifi- cent Late Works, which are on view at the Royal Academy.
Braque was a northern Frenchman — 'a typical Norman' in the opinion of Picasso's mistress Femande Olivier. He was born in Argenteuil beside the Seine, brought up in Le Havre, and later in life he established a house and studio at Varengeville near A wonderful colourist: Braque's 'Studio VIII, 1954-55 Dieppe, where he spent every summer. In contrast, Picasso, Matisse and Bonnard the three other supreme painters at work in Paris before the first world war — all even- tually moved to the Midi. But, as Madame Braque told the photographer Brassai, the Norman climate and light suited her hus- band's temperament better.
One can see it in the paintings. Braque was a wonderful colourist — far more so than Picasso, his old partner in the Cubist revolution — but his colour is of a very dif- ferent variety to the heightened palette of Bonnard and Matisse. Braque could use strong, bright colour too, as in the splendid `Mandolin and Score', the earliest picture in the exhibition, with its tomato reds and purples. But more often he was grave and subdued. The earlier of the 'Studio' series — the centrepiece of this show — are almost monochrome. He can do magical things with shades of dun, grey, combat-fatigue olive, and black (Braque loved black, a colour virtually banned from art by the Impressionists, and rehabilitated it).
In fact, his colour, like every other aspect of his art, was long pondered, each touch weighed before being added to the whole — Braque was in the habit of working on many pictures at the same time, sometimes taking five or ten years to finish a canvas. Each one is in a different colour key, as if it were a piece of music — the beige-black- green-grey 'Large Interior with Palette', for instance, is calm and harmonious, while `Pitcher, Candlestick and Fish', which hangs nearby, is shrill and dissonant, with jarring contrasts of black and lemon yellow, like a composition by Bartok. (Braque was a talented amateur musician, which is why so many instruments turn up in his still- lives.) Braque was once described as `elair, mesure, bourgeois', in contrast to Picasso, `sombre, excessif, revolutionnaire'. And, indeed, there are moments when Braque's work, with its gravity, reserve and intellec- tual power, puts one in mind of that of his fellow-Norman, Nicolas Poussin, born in Les Andelys. Braque was at once intensely intellectual — he published a number of Pascalian pensies — and earthily practical. Initially he had trained as a painter-decora- tor (it was Braque who showed the imprac- tical Picasso how to stick down his collages properly). There is a classical dignity and geometrical logic about these endlessly novel arrangements of tables, chairs, jugs, glasses and fish-bowls.
But there is also constant surprise, com- plexity and oddity. And this too was part of the temperament of Braque. 'It's all the same to me,' he once explained to John Richardson, 'whether a form represents a different thing to different people, or many things at the same time. And then I occa- sionally introduce forms which have no lit- eral meaning whatsoever. Sometimes these are accidents which happen to suit my pur- pose, sometimes "rhymes" which echo other forms, and sometimes rhythmical motifs which help to integrate a composi- tion and give it movement.'
Thus one finds, for example, solid forms in Braque's paintings that have melted away altogether. In 'Large Interior with Palette', and two of the 'Billiard Table' series, peculiar outlines overlay the paint- ing, resembling an irregular pair of horns on an ibex or a Minoan bull. They, in fact, represent the top of an easel, which would have obtruded into the painter's field of vision, but become transparent as if made of glass. In 'Studio II' a large light-brown arrow is sticking into the large vase in the fore- ground, representing nothing at all except the opposite direction to the bird that is taking wing across the background. Pre- sumahly this is one of the 'rhythmical Motifs which help to integrate a composi- tion'. Certainly without it the picture would fall apart.
Then Braque delighted in executing dif- ferent parts of a picture in radically differ- ent ways. There is a painting of two vases of flowers — 'The Double Bouquet' — divided by a double black and white line down the centre. On the left is a section painted in loose, blurred strokes in shades of greeny-grey and pinky-green, on the right another crisply outlined in sharp lines of white. In the 'Studio' series that com- plexity — sorting out whether what you arc seeing is a picture within a picture, an object in the studio, an abstract 'rhythmi- cal' shape, solid emptiness or transparent solidity — becomes dizzying, daunting and profound.
Throughout his life, Braque was preoccu- pied with the problem of painting space. That, as far as he was concerned, was the point of Cubism — to make a new kind of space at once more vividly tactile and more Problematic than the toy theatre of Renais- sance perspective. He and Picasso joined forces in that enterprise — like, as Braque once said in an unforgettable image, two mountaineers roped together. But there was a fundamental difference. With Picas- so, the human figure was primary; even landscapes and still-lives may turn out to have the detached body parts of his current woman hidden among them. That was because, with Picasso, primary emotions such as lust, rage, jealousy and fear of death were at the heart of his art. Braque was different. The human figure slowly dis- appears from his work — there are only two among the 46 pictures in this show, and one of these is the silhouette of the Man with Guitar', like someone in the pro- cess of being beamed up to a starship. For Braque the focus was on the experi- ence of space and things in space; the peo- ple are not in the picture, they are outside, looking.
That explains the narrow range of his art — a few things on a table, or the contents of his studio were quite enough. It explains too the generally calm, measured air of his painting (although there are some pictures done during the war, such as 'Pitcher and Skull' of 1943, which are stark and grim enough). As time passed, his preoccupation took on a visionary edge. Space and its contents, like art, were ultimately mysteri- ous, Braque believed. In his last years, that great bird appeared in his studio, and slow- ly flapped away into the sky.
It must be said that this is a difficult, demanding exhibition. So many grave, red- Cent interiors and still-lives, often subdued in colour, making a forbidding first impres- sion. None of the paintings leaps off the wall and grabs you by the throat — or some other part of the body — as Picassos do. These paintings need to be contemplated in the meditative calm with which they were painted.
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