"Braque: The Late Works." - Georges Braque, Royal Academy, London, England

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Robert Rosenblum

For all its hermetic intensity, the exhibition, in fact, helped to establish Braque's connections with other artists of his own and of later generations, so that at times the dense interiors of the late '40s, with their volatile interlacings of spatial ribbons that slice through solids, voids, and colors with equal ease, can even remind one of Pollock's simultaneous assaults on gravity and a once-palpable world.

Braque also challenges the textbook polarity between the French pastry chef and the Spanish tragedian of life, love, and death; for the claustrophobic and at times overtly lethal mood of Picasso's work during the war years is often shared by his old Cubist friend who, one world war earlier, had presumably gone off on what was to be a totally Gallic track. it is not only a question the recurrent pall of lugubrious gray tonalities that mute the light of these interiors, but of the very choice of objects depicted - the cross and grimacing skulls of the memento mori still-lifes; the unexpected importance of a stove and coal scuttle as a source of domestic warmth at a time of chilling austerity; the meager presence on a kitchen table of a single fish, a reflection, as Golding tells us in his consistently revealing catalogue essay, of the food rationing introduced to Paris in May 1941. And in a far different time zone, late Braque, as David Sylvester first suggested at a MOMA symposium last November, has surprising affinities with late Johns in the way both artists created an ever more complex and cryptic fusion between ambient space and commonplace objects contemplated in solitude, as if these ordinarily inanimate corners could be endowed with a secret life. (A hat and scarf hanging on the wall in one of Braque's interiors with billiard table take on an eerie, surrogate human presence that foreshadows the mysteries of Johns' pegboard clothing.) The language of Cubism, to be sure, had already challenged the fixed identities of objects as well as the boundaries between them and the spaces they occupied; but in these late works, the marriage of disparate forms and the meltdown of solid objects reach a new level of dark enchantment. In one canvas from the "Billiard Table" series, 144-52, this clumsy piece of furniture becomes magically fluid and translucent, its wood moldings and baize cover now taking wing like the fictional birds of the wallpaper, which unexpectedly fly toward us with the force of Van Gogh's crows. Braque, we learn, never had a billiard table to paint. Did he let his imagination seize upon Van Gogh's billiard table, along with its cue and trio of balls (one red and two white)? And far more overtly, Van Gogh looms large in a startlingly direct series of Normandy landscapes begun in 1955, a response, perhaps, to the exhibition "Van Gogh et les peintres d'Auvers-sur-Oise," held at the Orangerie in the winter of 1954-55. One of these poignantly simple paintings, Landscape with Dark Sky, is virtually a re-creation of the Dutch master's Wheatfield with Crows, not only in theme and format but in its heavy impasto, a bit of pictorial therapy whose outdoor air and expansive horizon offer a temporary respite from the sequestered visual and emotional intricacies of the studio paintings.