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

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Robert Rosenblum

And then there is that famous bird, even more imaginary than the billiard table and even more capable of levitating within the most confining studio walls. Swooping like an elusive dream through these shredded, tapestry-like spaces, it elevates Braque's shadowy interiors to exalted, luminous heights. In Studio V of 1949-50, its soaring flight can even set into uplifting, vibrant motion the goldfish bowl and its watery prisoner in the lower right corner; and as the poet Pierre Reverdy observed, the shape of the generic bird seems to rhyme with that of the still relatively earthbound palette below it. An informative catalogue essay by Sophie Bowness relates Braque's work to such contemporary poet-friends as Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge, Rene Char, and St.-John Perse, for whose L'Ordre des Oiseaux (1962) Braque provided modest illustrations. But Braque's bird, it seems to me, has deeper affinities with the Symbolist birds that flutter through Mallarme's poems with their pathos of "vols qui n'ont pas fui" (flights that have gone unflown) or their vision of an imaginary voyage to a world where "les oiseaux sont lyres d'etre parmi l'ecume inconnue et les cieux" (the birds are drunk from being amidst unknown foam and skies). An infinitely evocative symbol of creative aspiration, Mallarme's birds (at times a virgin-white swan) seem to beat their wings across the poetry of Braque's late "Studios." Seesawing breathlessly between the earthbound clutter of the artist's atelier and the imagined potential of an enchanted, airborne release through the magic of art, these profoundly contemplative paintings radiated an epic twilight.

Robert Rosenblum is professor of fine arts at New York University and a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.