Art: At the Cubist Root

The most illuminating discovery of the Renaissance painters was perspective and how to use it. Georges Braque did away with all that. “Perspective forces objects to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within reach,” he protested. So he brought objects up to the picture plane, as if squashed on a window. His cubism gave man a new perspective that indifferently abandoned the third dimension and then thoughtfully added the fourth, time, by giving multiple views of the same object.

Like his paintings, Braque was a man of many facets. He was an avid swimmer, a boxer, a wrestler. He played the accordion and drove speedy sports cars until age finally slowed him down. Then, capitulating completely, he bought a Rolls-Royce, explaining that ”it is as comfortable as a Pullman car and al most as big.”

He was immensely successful. His works sold for as much as $145,000. His aphorisms were published; his life was even illustrated in a comic strip. He became the only living artist ever to be shown in the Louvre—and joked at the triumph by rolling his eyes heavenward and saying, “Anyway, I’m already there.” Last week, at the age of 81, Georges Braque died of a stroke—and if he went to heaven, he will probably change its perspective too.

Wild Beasts. Braque always remembered watching, when he was a youth, as a poster of Toulouse-Lautrec’s Jane Avril was slapped on a nearby wall. Before the paste could dry, Braque peeled off the poster and tacked it up in his bedroom. At the age of 18, he was apprenticed to a decorator in Paris, feasted on the impressionists then in vogue, and began painting in the style of the coloristic Fauves, the “wild beasts.”

In later years, his youthful infatuation with the flamboyant Fauves embarrassed him as a childish excess. In 1908 Braque was drawn to fragment his vision in the manner that became known as Cubism, after seeing Picasso’s panorama of naked prostitutes, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Their fractured postures impelled Braque to a further dissection of nature. He and Picasso, working together, began turning out canvases so similar that in later years they could not recall which of them had painted what. In 1912 Braque invented the paper collage, in which scraps of newsprint and ticket stubs were glued onto the canvas. When people laughed at him, he said that he was bringing art even closer to reality.

Gentle Birds. Braque’s real master was Cezanne. And he followed his mas ters voice: “Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.” Braque found his cylinders, spheres and cones in still life—guitars, jugs, cigarette packages, knives and newspapers —and he projected his internal emotions into this world of objects. He painted few human figures, confessed that he found the human form ugly. While his comrade in Cubism, Picasso, was sensual, Spanish, and an endless innovator, Braque was rational, French, and restrained. As Braque explained in 1917: “The senses deform, the mind forms. Reality grows out of contained emotion. I like the rule that corrects the emotion.” But from his penchant for paradox, he added, “I love the emotion that corrects the rule.”

Braque violated many rules and traditions of both art and artists. He sold well almost from the start, and never lived like a bohemian. He preferred to paint by southern rather than northern light because it seemed less harsh. He was even happily married.

In his latest works, Braque painted mostly birds, perhaps a myopia of age but also a further probing of nature by studying a single subject. He depicted the heron, ibis and flamingo that frequent the Camargue in southern France, and the humble crow of the Norman fields near his summer home at Varengeville. His birds soar mysteriously, far above feathers and fuss. “In art,” said Braque, “One must respect the mystery. When one thinks he has plumbed it, he has only deepened it.”