Art: BRAQUE: THE COOL FIRE-SPITTER

WHEN French Painter Georges Braque walked into Pablo Picasso’s cluttered Montmartre studio on the Rue Ravignan 49 years ago, he saw on the easel a painting unlike anything he had ever imagined. Said Picasso fiercely, “This is going to cause a big noise.” And Picasso was right; his crosshatched galaxy of pink nudes, Demoiselles d’Avignon, ranks today as a turning point in art. But at the time, all that flabbergasted Georges Braque could say was, “You are trying to make us drink petrol in order to spit fire!”

The meeting in 1907 started one of the closest collaborations in art history, and Georges Braque went on to become the purest fire-spitter of all. His greatness is displayed this week in an 87-painting retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery. The show reaches back to the beginning, to such paintings as Trees at L’Estaque (see opposite), which is one of the first Cubist paintings. While Braque was creating it. Picasso was following the same route. So the two joined forces, as Braque puts it, “like mountaineers roped together,” and in five brilliant years of cubism proceeded to tear down some 400 years of art convention and mount the 20th century revolution in art.

Today the greatest living French artist is 74, silver-haired and slightly stooped. Georges Braque still likes to recall the all-night sessions of talk, drink and accordion playing at the

Montmartre bistro-dance hall Chez Frede and to talk fondly of his and Picasso’s revolution. “Cubism still exerts a strong influence,” he says. “Its possibilities are far from being exhausted. Cubism was not so much a new system, but rather a new ‘forme d”esprit.’ Of course, many fakers and would-be artists have tried their hands; they have cubized all nature. But true artists still find new inspirations in cubism.”

Braque, whose collaboration with Picasso ended when he went to war in 1914, kept in his postwar work only so much of the early cubism as helped him toward the summit of his ambition-“the painting of space.” Says Braque: “A still life lends itself particularly well to this effort. You should have the feeling that the objects almost stand out from the canvas, that you can physically touch them.”

The long effort to conquer space has brought Braque in his final years to his recent Studio VIII, which incorporates the whole range of past paintings, studio props and objects. His new central symbol is an anonymous bird. It is, like all Braque’s subjects, the visual image of his outstanding qualities-taste and purity. “In the old days,” Braque explains, “I used guitars, tables, carafes, sand and wallpaper to express what I had to say. Now it is the bird which helps me to explain myself.” With a smile he adds, “I started on the ground, and now I am slowly moving up toward the sky.”