484
PARTISAN REVIEW
surprises. A typical late composition of a table and a garden chair under a
striped awning, dated 1954-61, was unusual for its crispness and audacity;
everything in this complex harmony of gold, green, and gray was pushed
to the periphery, as though sliced and squeezed by the narrow canvas.
Not surprisingly, stililifes were the backbone of the show and its most
impressive aspect. Among the earliest, from the years when Braque and
Picasso, "roped together like mountain climbers," charted Cubism's
unknown territory, was a stunning collage,
Bottle and Guitar
(1914), a tight
cluster of pasted papers deployed against a playfully scribbled pencil draw–
ing that did double duty as guitar and table-top. A pair of Synthetic Cubist
pictures from 1918-post-Picasso-were also outstanding. In one, a con–
frontational rock-solid vertical table top, thick, crusty paint provided an
exact equivalent for its tightly piled composition. In the other, a brilliant
jangle of sharp-edged planes, nailed together by the emphatic diagonal of a
clarinet, floated against a complicated sky blue shape that at once suggest–
ed infinite space and thrust everything to the surface of the canvas.
Once Braque and Picasso formulated the language of Cubism, Braque
spoke it for the rest of his life, finding it a flexible, rich tongue that allowed
him to express infinite moods and emotions. The show followed the evo–
lution of his Cubist vocabulary with a wittily patterned picture from 1930,
a riot of angles, calligraphic strokes, and dots in gray and rose punctuated
wi th telling notes of sharp green, and wi th an airy , loosely strung
gueridon
of 1931-with a mandolin and the fruit bowl from the 1930 still life--a
curious picture whose relaxed, loopy drawing and fragile color harmonies
made it seem transparent despite the crustiness of its paint. The star of the
exhibition was the deservedly celebrated
L'Echo
(1953-56), an exuberant
spill of broadly painted fragments-studio props, a yellow pitcher, a bird,
and the eponymous newspaper-that at once reprised Braque's Cubist
past and summed up all the concerns of his last decade.
Despite Braque's secure place among the giants of twentieth-century
painting ("historical modernism" section), you don't often see a great
range of his work in this country, so it was exhilarating to be given proof
once again of his extraordinary gifts as a colorist, his uncanny ability to
orchestrate with equal power clear, singing chroma and murky "off" hues.
It was useful (and eye-testing) to be reminded that his sensitivity to
nuances of surface and touch could result either in potent, expressive paint–
ing or in
cuisine.
And it was good to be shown how Braque, at his best,
could transform even the most floridly painted, apparently banal subjects
into structures of overwhelming formal urgency. In a brief introduction to
the exhibition's catalogue, David Nash recalls that shortly after Braque's
death in 1964, four New York galleries-Knoedler, Peds, Rosenberg, and
Saidenberg-jointly presented "An American Tribute," a retrospective of
