ART CHRONICLE
531
of a whole. Look at the last room or so of the show at the Museum of
Modern Art. There Braque even abandons Cubism and goes back to
something not too unlike the late impressionism of Bonnard and Vuil–
lard, in search of a charm not rightly his. There he applies paint with a
clumsiness and a lack of taste and sincerity such as we would have
expected of him least of all. The ornateness of color and paint matter
is, even as ornateness, mechanical, manufactured; it is the notion, the
advertisement, the intention, not the reality of the quality iself (sec, for
example, "The Stove" of 1944).
It
is
sad. I become curious as to what Braque thinks of himself now.
Is he aware of what has happened to his great gift? What does he
feel about his relation to Picasso? Was it the absence from painting
which the 1914 war forced on him, his head wound, and his parting
with Picasso that made such a difference between the painter of "The
Portuguese" and the painter of "The Stove"? Did he need Picasso more
than Picasso needed him? Or are his temperament and native capacities,
and the turn of the times, the crucial factors- that is, crucial in more
than the ordinary sense? Braque's career strikes me as more puzzling
even than Leger's (whose importance begins lately to seem even greater
than his). How, in the hectic atmosphere of the School of Paris, was
he able to avert his glance from so many challenges?
Clement Greenberg
