Glimpses Of An Unsexy Tortoise

By ROBERT HUGHES

Has any great artist been more cavalierly treated by American museums than Georges Braque? Here is one of the great pioneers of modern painting: the man who, with Picasso, invented cubism; who then painted some of the most exquisitely felt and wrought pictures of our century; in whom the classicist, Cartesian strain in French painting came to a peak. Yet the last proper American survey of Braque (1882-1963) was almost 40 years ago. Since then there have been shows, very beautiful ones (how could they not be?), of this or that aspect of Braque. But the whole elephant? Never.

So it was good news that the Guggenheim Museum planned a Braque retrospective for its main summer show in 1988. The bad news, however, is that it is a casualty of museum gridlock. The Guggenheim has neatly timed it to clash with not one but two other Braque exhibitions, in Japan and Norway, so that half the paintings one would most want to see were unobtainable. The New York show samples all the stages of a long career, but it is complete only in a chronological sense. It does contain some of Braque's masterpieces, but it gives you just the scaffolding of the oeuvre, not its full body. Given the ever mounting difficulty of borrowing major paintings and the spiraling expense of insuring them, the complete Braque retrospective may now be beyond our reach.

But if there were one, would the crowds go? In the U.S., Braque is not a sexy painter. Americans prefer their artists to be overreachers in the short run, romantic heroes or doomed saints in the long. Braque was neither. Apart from youthful enthusiasms for boxing and fast cars, his life was completely taken up by his marriage and his art; German shrapnel in his head in World War I must have given him the respect for mortality that few artists get until middle age. Braque was a tortoise, not a hare, and his art had none of Picasso's impetuous virtuosity.

The earliest paintings in this show, like the portrait of his grandmother from 1900-02, are timid, earnest homages to Corot and Boudin. In 1905 he saw what Matisse and Derain had done at Collioure, under Van Gogh's spell, with the hot colors and white light of the Midi. Prodded by his friends Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy, he began to paint the colder northern light of Antwerp in a fauve style. But in this early work there is a sense of discomfort. Braque did not draw very well, and, as he lacked the graphic fluency of his mentors, his responses to fauvism were awkward and corseted.

The formative early influence on him was the 1907 Cezanne retrospective in Paris. Cezanne's slow chewing at the motif, his persistence, his anxiety, his search for a sculptural grandeur in bodies and landscape (faceted on the surface, dense as limestone below) became, for Braque, a moral absolute. Cezanne's greatness lay in his "classical impersonality," opening a way to what Braque called the "total possession of things." A weakness of the Guggenheim show is that it contains none of the paintings from 1908-09 with which, at L'Estaque in the south and the village of La Roche-Guyon outside Paris, Braque dug himself into and then out of Cezanne. Nor does it have the clumsy but crucial Large Nude of 1908, in which he struggled to make sense of the shock of first seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. There is, however, the marvelous 1909 Harbor in Normandy -- a seascape of vectors, in which hulls, spars, water and sky are made of the same brown-and-blue prismatic substance, buckling in shallow space.

Braque's relation to Picasso in the making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso.

In Braque's cubism, the subject matter of Chardin -- a violin, a table, a pipe, a bottle, a printed page -- was born again into the fragmented world of the modern city, its silvery-brown light intact. The speckles in his cubist paintings became a fine-tuned vibrato, unlike the more assertive planes of his partner. This made coherent form melt more readily toward abstraction, which Braque did not want. Rather, as he put it, he wanted to "take the object and raise it high, very high."

To avert this problem he resorted to collage: scraps of newsprint or wallpaper pasted into the picture. This technique, so fundamental to modern art, seems to have been Braque's invention and not Picasso's. He made the first papier colle in 1912, Picasso following a week later. Moreover, Braque had been a house painter's apprentice and thoroughly understood the techniques of wood graining and false-finishing. He could reproduce a "real" fragment of a room, a table, a still life at will, whenever the image needed to be brought back to flatness and density out of the jumble of ambiguous signs.

This sense of the surface and its continuity led to the decorative grandeur of his later still lifes. Braque loved "slow" surfaces, porous and mortared, the paint mixed with sand or sawdust. They had a solid, discreet material presence. They sucked the paint out of the brush and made fluent, wristy drawing impossible. Instead, all is deliberate plotting. You do not look through the paint but at it. Braque's determination to keep everything on the surface is the first thing that strikes you in the great still lifes and interiors of the 1940s and '50s, and it lends them the breadth and declamatory power of traditional fresco. Even when the form is inherently mysterious or logically inexplicable -- like the bird that flaps like a silent, benign apparition through the workaday clutter in his Studio paintings of 1949-56 -- you are aware of its density.

The miracle of late Braque lies in this conjuncture of the explicit and the poetic. The green surface of The Billiard Table, 1945, folding in the middle, seems to be foundering in the aqueous gray and olive planes of the room like a sinking ship. Perhaps there is a ghost of a clue in the barely visible lettering on the wall, part of a cafe sign reminding patrons of the law against public drunkenness. But between the elements of the painting there is a continuous jostling, circling and reflection, a sense of the vitality of form in every particular, that puts metaphoric reflection and wordplay back in second place. It is the form, and the subtlety of its myriad relationships in spaces you feel you can touch, that counts. And there are enough paintings at this level in the Guggenheim's show to convey a sense of Braque's achievement, even though its full scope is not, alas, there.