Art: Glimpses Of An Unsexy Tortoise

A new Braque show offers too little of a great thing

Has any 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.

So it...

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