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 was good news that the Guggenheim Museum planned a Braque retrospective for its main summer show in 1988. The bad news, however, is that it is a casualty of museum gridlock. The Guggenheim has neatly timed it to clash with not one but two other Braque exhibitions, in Japan and Norway, so that half the paintings one would most want to see were unobtainable. The New York show samples all the stages of a long career, but it is complete only in a chronological sense. It does contain some of Braque's masterpieces, but it gives you just the scaffolding of the oeuvre, not its full body. Given the ever mounting difficulty of borrowing major paintings and the spiraling expense of insuring them, the complete Braque retrospective may now be beyond our reach.
But if there were one, would the crowds go? In the U.S., Braque is not a sexy painter. Americans prefer their artists to be overreachers in the short run, romantic heroes or doomed saints in the long. Braque was neither. Apart from youthful enthusiasms for boxing and fast cars, his life was completely taken up by his marriage and his art; German shrapnel in his head in World War I must have given him the respect for mortality that few artists get until middle age. Braque was a tortoise, not a hare, and his art had none of Picasso's impetuous virtuosity.
The earliest paintings in this show, like the portrait of his grandmother from 1900-02, are timid, earnest homages to Corot and Boudin. In 1905 he saw what Matisse and Derain had done at Collioure, under Van Gogh's spell, with the hot colors and white light of the Midi. Prodded by his friends Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy, he began to paint the colder northern light of Antwerp in a fauve style. But in this early work there is a sense of discomfort. Braque did not draw very well, and, as he lacked the graphic fluency of his mentors, his responses to fauvism were awkward and corseted.