The deeper instinct

For an artist who is held in universal respect and esteem for decades by museum visitors, collectors and art historians, Georges Braque seems to be very little loved. In the popular imagination he has remained resolutely remote – the intensely cerebral process of visual analysis and interpretation that led to Cubism appeals to the head, but rarely to the emotions. A handful of recognisable motifs have come to serve as visual shorthand for his oeuvre – the angular flying bird, the collages with newspaper headlines and the bulbous silhouette of a jug that pop up in different guises. But the lack of a single signal work to ignite revolution has made his narrative less compelling than that of his collaborator in the Cubist experi­ment, Pablo Picasso. This failure, together with a private life as uncolourful as his own palette, have meant that his work is more often reproduced in histories of modernism than on T-shirts.

It seems unlikely that the Grand Palais’ current exhibition, “Georges Braque” (until 6 January 2014; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, 16 February-11 May 2014), will change that, but it achieves much more in offering an overview of a career that in recent decades has only been seen piecemeal – the Tate’s “Georges Braque Printmaker” of 1993 and the Royal Academy’s 1997 “Late Braque” rounded out specific aspects of his career, but the current show has mined so deeply the seam of period-defining works that to gather them in one place again within the next 30 years will be nearly impossible.
By the turn of the century, when Braque, the son of a painter-decorator, moved to Paris from Le Havre where he had grown up, Impressionism was becoming old hat. At the Salon d’Automne in 1905 he first saw the works of Matisse and Derain, and under their influence rejected the plein-air artists’ preoccupations with light and nature, painting instead the strident pink skies and ­mushroom-cloud trees that open this show.

The shocking colours and conventional subjects of Fauvism were not really his style, however, and marking his stylistic break with Fauvism is the Large Nude of 1907, which hangs here as a herald to the room of Cubist works and reveals, in its mask-like features and angular form, his discovery, through his new friend Picasso, of African sculpture. This, as Braque wrote, permitted him “to make contact with instinctive things, with direct manifestations that were in opposition to the false traditionalism which I abhorred”.

The Cubist experiment, which lasted from 1907 to 1914, was the product of intense discussions between Braque and Picasso as they thrashed out notions of representation. They were, in Braque’s famous phrase, “like two mountaineers roped together”: “We lived in Montmartre, we saw one another every day, we talked. During those years Picasso and I discussed things which nobody will ever discuss again, which nobody else would know how to discuss, which nobody else would know how to understand.” Neither artist ever claimed the leading role in their explorations of a new way of representing space that rejected colour, perspective and recession and fractured objects into multiple volumes, showing several facets of a subject simultaneously.

Into assemblages of bottles, pipes and coffee cups, Braque introduced newspaper mastheads – the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Still life with a Pair of Banderillas of 1911 refers to a bullfighting newspaper Picasso read – as visual reference points. With his collages, starting with Fruit Dish and Glass of 1912, on show here, Braque took this idea a step further, including wood-textured printed paper to suggest the surface of a table, newsprint to indicate a newspaper laying on it (such as in Violin and Pipe of 1913-14), and ephemera such as product wrapping (as in the Pompidou Centre’s Still Life on a Table of 1914), which were then integrated into the composition by drawing or painting. Of all the works on show here, it is perhaps these unexpectedly moving pictures, with their temptingly tactile surfaces and incorporating sand and wood-shavings, which speak most immediately of that time of intense discovery.

In the years that followed the First World War, Braque’s relationship with Picasso waned, and he retreated from the abstraction of his pre-war works to return to figurative painting. He often worked on several series simultaneously, and in sharply differing styles – the creation of the monumental classical basket-bearing female figures included in the exhibition was concurrent with that of large ­groupings of objects on mantelpieces, such as Still life with a Guitar I from Prague, in which musical instruments and bowls of fruit jostle on fireplace surrounds in overlapping planes.

Throughout his career, Braque chose subjects more for the pictorial challenges they presented than for the intrinsic symbolism of the objects themselves. He resisted the interpretations of his images of birds – which here fill a joyful, light-filled final gallery – as signifiers of freedom, for instance, and never offered a convenient “take-home ­message” for any of his works. At different points in his life, though, particular subjects seemed to resonate – the sombre mood of the occupation of France can be read in the Vanitas of 1939, with its rough-hewn cross and rosary, and it is tempting to read into the austere plates of rigid fish from the early 1940s a yearning for a time when food was more plentiful. 

Braque is not the sort of artist that the celebrity-driven art world of today demands. He had little time for self-promotion. Themes – so central to art today, when every mark made has to offer itself up for interpretation of the artist’s intention – were to Braque incidental to the representation itself. While Picasso was reinventing the role of artist as celebrity, Braque was reinventing art itself, and the visual world is richer for that.