Braque at 80

"Like the alcoholic who takes his little glass in the morning," the old man once said, "I take up my brushes." Though frail, Georges Braque still takes up his brushes each morning in his Paris studio near the Pare de Montsouris. He may work standing for a while; more often, he sits grandly on a divan and calls for his brushes and colors like a surgeon calling for his scalpels and clamps. This week he will be 80--the same age as his ebullient former partner, Pablo Picasso.

Though Picasso's pyrotechnics are certainly more dazzling, Braque ranks as one of the great innovators in modern art (see color). And if he has explored a more limited area, he has often probed deeper. He can find in one room more excitement than another man might find in a world. He can paint the commonest object and somehow suggest a universe. "Progress in art," he says, "does not consist in extending one's limitations, but in knowing them better."

Cylinder & Sphere. Last fall the Louvre, anticipating Braque's anniversary a bit, gave him the only show that venerable museum ever put on for a living artist. It was the more appropriate because, early in the century, Braque studied paintings at the Louvre, copying such old masters as Raphael. He then painted for a while in the boldly colorful style of the Fauves (the wild beasts). But the man who made the deepest impression on him in his youth was Cezanne, who had given the younger generation a new slogan: "Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."

On seeing an exhibition of Braque's paintings in 1908. Louis Vauxcelles, the critic responsible for the term Fauves, noted that Braque. "a very bold young man." seemed to reduce everything to "cubes." Soon, the word cubism was a part of art's vocabulary. Picasso had also begun experimenting with geometric planes, and when he and Braque met. they formed a partnership. Picasso called his friend "Pard." an expression gleaned from the silent western films then popular in France, and the two men painted so much alike that even they sometimes had difficulty telling who had painted what. The partnership gradually dissolved, but not until it had changed the course of modern art.

Cubism did away with Renaissance perspective, which, said Braque. "forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach." It also confirmed something that men had always known but rarely recorded: that objects seen close up tend to dissolve, fragment and multiply. This fragmentation, said Braque, "helped me establish space and movement in space. I couldn't introduce the object until I had created space."

Mystery & Universality. In a flurry of experimentation. Braque produced the first paper collage, mixed sand into his paint to achieve new textures, introduced lettering into his pictures to suggest themes of everyday life. He was so inventive, in fact, that Picasso began to refer to him as "Vilbur." after the American Wilbur Wright. After World War I. in which he was badly wounded. Braque became more contemplative. His new paintings were relaxed: the rigid geometry, finally uncaged, became fluid.

To a large degree, the still life became his world. He painted musical instruments--objects that come alive at the touch--with such loving care that Juan Gris called the guitar Braque's "new madonna." Braque liked to be able to feel these objects; but in a larger sense, the objects were also as intangible as the themes of a symphony. "I try to make the object lose its usual function." he said. "It is only then that it acquires the quality of universality."

Today, as he has been for many years, Braque is fascinated by birds. He has never said exactly what the bird means, but no creature better represents movement and freedom in space. In The Bird and Its Nest, the space is black with mystery, like infinity itself. The viewer's eye is caught up by the deceptively simple forms only to find itself staring into an endless beyond, as it once was made to clamber over Braque's intricate geometric planes. Whether he intended to or not. Braque has restored to the bird its ancient role as messenger of the spirit and bearer of the soul. "In art." says Braque, "there is a mystery present. One must respect the mystery. When one thinks he has plumbed it, he has only deepened it."

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