Georges Braque at the Grand Palais and other reflections

Georges Braque, Atelier V, 1949, Oil on Canvas, Collection of the MoMA

Fifty years after his death, the Georges Braque retrospective at the Grand Palais opened in mid-September here in Paris.  Braque is one of those painters that is known universally, but often by name only, and is often disregarded as the sidekick of Picasso . . . This retrospective allows us to see the work of the most painterly of the masters of modernism alone, and brilliantly so.

What one discovers in this retrospective is not only the full breadth of his work, but how opulent the paintings are in themselves.  The MoMA's "Atelier V" reproduced above was a favorite of mine when I was living in New York and it was a treat to see it here in Paris with all its brothers and sisters, within the context of Braque's life's work.  What is striking about Braque's paintings is the diversity of his touch.  Every square inch of his paintings is carefully thought through, painted with intensity and lavishly executed.  The physicality of the surfaces he creates is a feast to the eyes and in his greatest masterpieces, like "Atelier V", the touch and physicality of his painting transforms into the perfect manifestations of what one would call the "spirit."  

It is all a bit gauche to speak of the human spirit nowadays; we post-modern people are so smart, so critical and so doubtful to the point where we don't want to believe in anything apart from that which is the most concrete, i.e. money.  With a bankruptcy of ideas, when the ideals of the "human spirit" appears to be no longer capable of imagining anything more worthwhile than being rich, one tends to only see the worst of artistic production (I am speaking of course of the league of post-modern celebrity artists whom I will not name).  This cynicism is sort of like an armor, it protects us from the failures of our fathers, but it also separates us from one of the basics of artistic production, the need to believe in the project of our life as an artist, a project that stands outside of commercial success, outside of other needs such as recognition and validation by those around us.  

Going back to Braque, the wonder of a painting like "Atelier V" is that Braque has composed a painting about the human spirit, here embodied in the flattened shape of a bird-like figure.  This ghostly flattened figure floats through the space of an artist's studio--palette, table, still-life objects, easel, window dimmed--the accumulation of light on the symphony of muted tones, shapes, lines, all somehow transfigures the painting into something else.  The physicality of Braque's painting captures the very notion of idea, spirit, thought -- the most abstract of things we humans are capable of.

Braque's paintings are necessarily difficult at first.  They do not seek to enthrall, to impress, nor are they seductive in simple terms.  Like aged cheese and old wine, the most French of traditions, Braque's work requires one to quiet down, to look, to contemplate, to wonder, think and reflect.  It is like the quiet meditation that one finally finds after an hour of yoga, or the Chabbat of rest one reaches after a week of work.  Braque's paintings asks us to look differently, to think differently, to reflect differently--one let's go of the need to work, to be useful, to be efficient, to consume, and one looks at the infinite touches of light on the meditative surfaces of his canvases, flickering, full of air, space and, I will say it, eternity.

At the Grand Palais until January 6, and then later traveling to Houston, one can see the career of a great painter, with all its richness and exquisite grandeur.  Vraiment incontournable.

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In 1917, in the review Nord-Sud, Braque wrote an article entitled "Thoughts and Reflections on Painting."  

In art, progress does not come from the extension of but in the understanding of one's limits. 

The limitations of means [ability] produces a style, creates new form, and promotes creation.  

New means, new subjects.

The subject matter is not the object, it is the new unity, the lyricism, which are completely outside of the domain of ability.  

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. 

The goal is not the concern of reconstituting an anecdote but to constitute a pictorial fact. 

One must not imitate that which one wants to create. 

One cannot imitate a look or an appearance, it is the final result.  In order to achieve pure imitation, painting must make abstraction of appearances. 

To work from nature [before the motif] is to improvise. 

One must be careful to not fall into a formula by which one does everything, including the interpretation of other artistic practices as well as reality itself, by which instead of creating one produces only a style or rather a stylization.
The artistic practices which have imposed themselves by their purity have never been formulaic and good for everything.  Antique Greek sculpture and its subsequent decadence amongst others have taught us this.  The senses deform, the spirit forms.  To work in order to make perfect the spirit.  There is no certainty apart from that which the spirit  understands. [my emphasis]  A painter who wishes to make a circle will only make something round.  It is possible that this appearance will satisfy him but he will doubt the result.  A compass will give him certitude of the circle's correctness.  The collaged elements of my drawings have also given me certitude. 

Trompe-l'oeil is due to anecdotal coincidence which imposes itself by the simplicity of its facts. 

The collages and the imitation of woodgrain -- and other elements in the same vein -- of which I use in some of my drawings impose themselves by their simplicity and it is this which is mistaken with trompe-l'oeil, but in fact, they are the exact opposite.  They are simple facts but created by the spirit, and they are the justification of a new form of figuration in space. 

Nobility comes from contained emotion. 

Emotion must not be translated by stirred trembling.  It cannot be compounded nor can it be imitated.  Emotion is a seed and the work it produces is its birth. 

I love the rule which corrects the emotion.

 (My translation from the French original, which is found in the exhibition catalog published for the retrospective)