Word: picassos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great artist been more cavalierly treated by American museums than Georges Braque? Here is one of the great pioneers of modern painting: the man who, with Picasso, invented cubism; who then painted some of the most exquisitely felt and wrought pictures of our century; in whom the classicist, Cartesian strain in French painting came to a peak. Yet the last proper American survey of Braque (1882-1963) was almost 40 years ago. Since then there have been shows, very beautiful ones (how could they not be?), of this or that aspect of Braque. But the whole elephant? Never...
...life was completely taken up by his marriage and his art; German shrapnel in his head in World War I must have given him the respect for mortality that few artists get until middle age. Braque was a tortoise, not a hare, and his art had none of Picasso's impetuous virtuosity...
...Estaque in the south and the village of La Roche-Guyon outside Paris, Braque dug himself into and then out of Cezanne. Nor does it have the clumsy but crucial Large Nude of 1908, in which he struggled to make sense of the shock of first seeing Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. There is, however, the marvelous 1909 Harbor in Normandy -- a seascape of vectors, in which hulls, spars, water and sky are made of the same brown-and-blue prismatic substance, buckling in shallow space...
Braque's relation to Picasso in the making of cubism after 1910 -- "roped together like mountaineers," in that famous phrase of Braque's -- was of course the legendary partnership of 20th century art. Like most legends, this one is ill understood. Who was the dominant and who the submissive partner? Neither, but Braque's cubist paintings, and even more his papiers colles of 1912-14, show a continuity of inspiration quite unlike the more darting, prehensile mental habits of Picasso...
...avert this problem he resorted to collage: scraps of newsprint or wallpaper pasted into the picture. This technique, so fundamental to modern art, seems to have been Braque's invention and not Picasso's. He made the first papier colle in 1912, Picasso following a week later. Moreover, Braque had been a house painter's apprentice and thoroughly understood the techniques of wood graining and false-finishing. He could reproduce a "real" fragment of a room, a table, a still life at will, whenever the image needed to be brought back to flatness and density out of the jumble...