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This sense of the surface and its continuity led to the decorative grandeur of his later still lifes. Braque loved "slow" surfaces, porous and mortared, the paint mixed with sand or sawdust. They had a solid, discreet material presence. They sucked the paint out of the brush and made fluent, wristy drawing impossible. Instead, all is deliberate plotting. You do not look through the paint but at it. Braque's determination to keep everything on the surface is the first thing that strikes you in the great still lifes and interiors of the 1940s and '50s, and it lends them the breadth and declamatory power of traditional fresco. Even when the form is inherently mysterious or logically inexplicable -- like the bird that flaps like a silent, benign apparition through the workaday clutter in his Studio paintings of 1949-56 -- you are aware of its density.
The miracle of late Braque lies in this conjuncture of the explicit and the poetic. The green surface of The Billiard Table, 1945, folding in the middle, seems to be foundering in the aqueous gray and olive planes of the room like a sinking ship. Perhaps there is a ghost of a clue in the barely visible lettering on the wall, part of a cafe sign reminding patrons of the law against public drunkenness. But between the elements of the painting there is a continuous jostling, circling and reflection, a sense of the vitality of form in every particular, that puts metaphoric reflection and wordplay back in second place. It is the form, and the subtlety of its myriad relationships in spaces you feel you can touch, that counts. And there are enough paintings at this level in the Guggenheim's show to convey a sense of Braque's achievement, even though its full scope is not, alas, there.