Art: House Painter’s Son

Like almost all modern artists, Georges Braque was caught in the propeller of his fast-flying onetime friend Pablo Picasso. But in Braque’s case it didn’t hurt a bit. Last week the Cleveland Museum of Art was staging the biggest Braque show ever seen in the U.S.—114 pieces covering every phase of his career. Braque may not be the alltime great painter he is considered in Paris, but the Cleveland show gave ample evidence that he ranks with the finest alive.

Unlikely Cheroot. Unlike Picasso’s, Braque’s best paintings are apt to be recent works. A standout (not in the show) was The Carafe (1942), a dinnertime still life in black, brown, blue and beige. Braque had ingeniously illuminated the canvas with three different kinds of light —the silvery gleam of a spoon, the watery sparkle of a carafe, and the glint of fish scales—all successfully simulated by bare patches of canvas used in contrast to the surrounding depths of color.

Braque’s Painter and Model (1939) was a more ambitious essay in shadow and substance. The black and tan model and black and grey artist—who, unlike clean-shaven, square-cut Braque, sported a spade beard and cheroot—both wavered in uncertain silhouette against the grey and yellow wallpaper. At one moment the figures seemed thin as cardboard; at another they became block-solid.

Painter Braque was born 66 years ago and was brought up in Le Havre. His father, a house painter, encouraged the boy’s attempts to draw, but his teachers at the local Ecole des Beaux Arts wondered why. A slow, deliberate student, Braque accomplished nothing much until 1909, the year he teamed up with Picasso. The two became inseparable and for a while their work was almost indistinguishable. Together they invented “cubism”*—painting the visible world as if it were built of tiny blocks, and tumbling the blocks about at will.

Missing Models. By 1914 they had quarreled. Picasso went his wild way; Braque stuck with cubism. Over the years Braque’s paintings grew simpler and subtler, his cubes melted and merged. Where his predominantly low-keyed palette had given even his landscapes a stuffy, indoor look, he came to use flashes of fresh color. His compositions looked fragile as a house of cards, but being perfectly balanced they stood up.

Settled down in Paris, he works in a studio as neat as a laboratory. There are no still lifes and no models in sight, because he never paints directly from nature. “I discover my picture on the canvas the way a fortuneteller reads the future in tea leaves,” he explains. “I never visualize a picture in my mind before starting to paint. On the contrary I believe that a picture is finished only after one has completely effaced the idea that was there at the start.”

* Though it may have been Henri Matisse who gave it a name when he looked at a Braque landscape and remarked: “What a lot of cubes!”