Volume 54, Number 10 · June 14, 2007
In Braque's Studio
By John Golding
Georges Braque: A Life
by Alex Danchev
Arcade, 440 pp., $40.00
After Henri Matisse's death in 1954, Georges Braque came to be recognized generally as the greatest living French painter. Picasso as a Spaniard was hors concours; and indeed in a very real way this is what he had been since he had ridden so quickly to fame in the first decade of the century. But already, before this, in the minds of some Braque was considered an artist superior to either Picasso or Matisse. In 1945 Jean Paulhan, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française and a minor collector, published an important book entitled Braque le Patron in which he stated, 'Braque is the artist, without hesitation, whom I take as a Master.' Earlier, in 1932, he wrote to a friend, 'Picasso makes so much noise that one loves Braque...for his silence, and finally because one imagines he knows so much more than the other.' Braque had long since been recognized internationally as a major artist, but his position in France was probably reinforced by the fact that when Matisse's glorious late papiers découpés were shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1949, they were coolly viewed and were felt by many to show him falling off in old age. Although Picasso's years with Françoise Gilot (1943–1953) saw his greatest activity in the fields of pottery and book illustration, his canvases of the time, with a few exceptions, did not rival in intensity those of preceding periods or of others that were to follow.
Review, 5323 words
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