Braque and the Tests of Time

...On one occasion, for example, he tried his hand at designing stained glass windows for a chapel near his Normandy home...

...But Braque's works already begin to seem to us more faithful to the grand manner, if not to the actual styles, of the great masters of the past...

...This could never be said of any of Braque's work...

...Only Hitler's own National-Socialist Realism, so similar to Stalin's Socialist Realism in its trite pathos, is no longer at all represented...

...Picasso's personality and immediate impact on his contemporaries have certainly been more powerful than Braque's...

...In his great Cubist still-life compositions, Braque has far more frequently refrained from using collage materials and techniques, preferring to reproduce newsprint almost realistically with traditional pigments which have not become brown with time, as has the newsprint in so many major collage works of Picasso, where texture and color-harmonies very often tend to deteriorate so rapidly...

...Braque's appeal may also prove more lasting because his superior craftsmanship is more personal and expresses an essential characteristic of his genius...

...It also is the scene of an annual show of Munich's avant-garde art which increasingly reveals the popularity in postwar Germany of every modern art trend of the past 60 years— good, bad or indifferent—forbidden in the Third Reich...

...Now a familiar feature of Munich's urban landscape and of West Germany's cultural life, despite its dated architecture, the building has withstood the tests of time better than the more purely political institutions of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich...

...He even modified the details of his original sketch if he found that the exact colors required were not available or that others, which were available, pleased him more or matched better than those originally considered...

...In the works of Braque there is no such over simplification of the tasks of artistic creation...

...However much he worked, though, he never yielded to the temptations of mass production...

...Braque's prints, in particular, display almost unbelievably high standards of taste, inventiveness and craftsmanship...

...If he has now neglected to leave us any important monument in this field, it is surely not for lack of patrons...

...The results appear to have discouraged him and, when I visited the chapel a couple of summers ago, I found it difficult to believe that these modest and somewhat characterless windows had actually been designed by so great a painter...

...Like Hercules Seghers, whom Rembrandt so much admired, Braque was fascinated by the actual work of printing...

...Coming a few months after the artist's death, it suggests a serious reappraisal of his significance and his relationship to other Paris masters of his generation, so few of whom are still alive...

...In addition, Picasso's textures are often of so little importance that the reproductions of his works which fail to render them at all betray them far less than they would inevitably betray Braque...

...Though his scope was often limited by his insistence on his own kind of perfection in everything that bore his name, he rarely repeated himself...

...Yet there seems to be something almost paradoxical in all this...

...Thus, in seeking inspiration from works of such masters of the past as Velasquez, Goya, Liotard or Manet, Picasso only saw their subjects and their composition, producing variations on their mere iconography...

...Subject, composition, colors and textures are handled as elements of a single integrated problem which is solved as a whole, without neglecting any of its parts to the advantage of one of them...

...Time and the proper choice of handling of the artist's materials may thus dictate, in the long run, our appreciation of his importance, even our tastes, when we begin to wonder, on the evidence of works which have become too fragmentary to move us, why certain reputations were so great and whether the authors of so many irretrievably damaged masterpieces may not, after all, have impressed their contemporaries as social personalities rather than as real artists...

...As a colorist, Picasso is nearly always somewhat rudimentary and makes few demands even on such techniques of color reproduction as offset printing...

...Too many modern masters now leave the actual printing of their works, if not even the engraving of their plates, to craftsmen in specialized but somewhat commercial workshops...

...Perhaps after this experiment, Braque felt that stained glass required too much reliance on other craftsmen whose work he could not direct or control as thoroughly as he might have wished...

...It was intended as a permanent home for the annual exhibitions of Nazi art which he promoted in opposition to all styles of modern art that he condemned as degenerate or culturally Bolshevistic...

...Yet Lurçat, a far less careful artist in his matching of wools, is generally recognized as the greatest designer of contemporary tapestries, perhaps only because he has lent himself more easily to the journalistic or commercial promotion of his work...

...Ofen, in producing some 30 numbered prints from a single plate on a hand press, Braque enjoyed varying his materials and his techniques, as Seghers did, by using different inks or different paper for each copy...

...Many of Braque's prints thus have a quality that makes each one appear unique, even when all those of a single run happen to be identical, so carefully has each one been personally printed by the master himself...

...But the subtle color harmonies achieved in the juxtapositions of the various wools are so faithful to Braque's own harmonies as a painter that one immediately realizes how much attention he must have devoted to the choice of the wools to be used...

...Braque proved, in this respect, to have remained exceptionally conscientious...

...Often, one has good reason to suspect him of having studied cheap color reproductions rather than the originals, neglecting all other problems of color or texture that these also solve...

...This is also why Braque's works lend themselves less easily than Picasso's to the kind of cheap color reproduction which now popularizes an artist but betrays the unique quality of his individual works...

...In contrast to these artists...

...After mammoth exhibitions of Picasso, Chagall and other modern masters, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst is offering until December 15 an outstanding retrospective of the work of Georges Braque...

...Edouard Roditi, an American poet and art historian now residing in Paris, is author of Dialogues on Art...

...Readers of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas might indeed be tempted to disagree more than ever with many of the evaluations pronounced there ex cathedra by the late oracle of the Rue de Fleurus, who so emphatically insisted that Picasso was a greater artist than Braque and is even reported to have become estranged from her brother Leo Stein because he continued to be interested in Matisse and Braque...

...They withstand, for instance, all the tests of time far better than many of Picasso's works, so many of which (especially his muchtravelled Guernica) might already guarantee a steady income to restorers...

...An irony of fate and a shortage of other suitable premises has led, since 1945, to the frequent use of this building for very popular retrospectives of the work of major leaders of the art movements Hitler so radically banned...

...One indeed begins to suspect that many of Braque's works, in a hundred years or more, may be more generally recognized than now as major masterpieces of our age, if only because so many works of other contemporary masters will by then have deteriorated beyond recognition or repair...

...For signed, colored lithographs many Paris masters hand their original watercolor or gouache to the lithographer, giving him a free hand in the choosing and matching of inks, then sign and number the required quantity of copies without ever supervising the actual production of these works that are destined to be sold as originals...

...As a "genius" to be met in a salon or to be presented to a larger public in the press, on a movie screen or in a television program, Braque was less striking and less sensational than Picasso...

...Braque's attention to detail may sometimes have limited his scope...

...For while he was less individualistic in his social behavior than Picasso or Chagall, in his work Braque remained far more faithful to the great traditions of artistic individualism...

...It is interesting in this respect to observe that even during his most experimental Cubist years—in works which might claim to be finished or important—Braque relied much more rarely than Picasso on materials or techniques which deteriorate too easily...

...The Munich exhibition includes a large tapestry executed after a still-life design supplied by Braque...

...In an age when the production techniques of industry encroach more and more on art, Braque appeared to be fighting a losing battle...

...Of all the tapestries produced in recent years in France after designs by well-known modern painters, Braque's are certainly the only ones to give us the impression of having been woven by the artist himself...

...Picasso's huge UNESCO mural offers us as an original some shockingly crude textures and, in even a cheap reproduction, may lose more of its faults than of its virtues...