People who are somewhat familiar with the history of art in the 20th century have to be taken aback by this introductory sentence: “The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen pays tribute to Georges Braque, who has hitherto been neglected in Germany, as a pioneering artist of the French avant-garde.” It says on the opening board in Düsseldorf’s K20 Museum, as if Braque were a discovery. The inventor of Cubism “little noticed”? A painter, whose influence can be proven over decades in legions of artists through formative traces, has to be re-presented as “groundbreaking”? Or has someone in Düsseldorf mixed amnesia pills into the drinking water?
The first exhibition in thirty years was locked down in winter
It is now true that the extensive Braque retrospective at Hamburg’s Bucerius Art Forum last winter, which was only seen a few days before and after the lockdown, was the artist’s first overview exhibition in Germany in 30 years. But in the years before that, there were major exhibitions in Paris and Vienna. And it is also correct that, in comparison with his Cubism accomplice Picasso, after the First World War, Braque steadily moved away from the boiling point of prominence, because he never achieved the originality of his youth when he initiated the revolutionary overcoming of the prevailing rules of art. Nevertheless, there is no mention of Cubism in the literature without the name Georges Braque, more recently with the addition that he, not Picasso, was the real “inventor of Cubism”.
The exhibition in Düsseldorf shows the whole painter, starting with paintings that are still heavily based on Matisse or Derain. Like his “Landscape near La Ciotat” (1907).
(Photo: Art Collection North Rhine-Westphalia, Düsseldorf. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)
So what new insights can an exhibition with the title: “Braque – Inventor of Cubism” offer? Where is it limited to his first eight years between 1906 and the beginning of the war, in which Braque broke away from sunny Fauvism and came to the dissolution of perspective and form in a color spectrum of gray, brown and a little green? For this section, the curator Susanne Meyer-Büser complains, the assembly of 61 works was “hard work”, because there are only 60 Fauvist and almost 300 Cubist works by Braque from this period in the world (in contrast to Picasso, which produced a multiple).
The painter of luminous landscapes reduced his palette and became abstract
The meticulously comprehensible change that Braque drove in his searching years can be roughly divided into three chapters. The sensual color enhancement of harbors, landscapes and village views through just a few brushstrokes, with which he sought the closeness to Matisse and Derain. The transition phase from 1908, when Braque, under the influence of Cezanne’s idea that “nature should be represented according to cylinder, sphere and cone”, dismantled figurative motifs such as buildings, still lifes, rocks or plants into cubist elements. And finally the breakthrough in what was perhaps the decisive correction of course in painting in the early 20th century, when Braque, in his daily dialogue with Picasso, continued to dissolve the image into an antithesis of the body. He reduced the outlines to an associative framework and the plasticity to the terse dialogue of wild lines in a colorless flatness.
Now art historians may see this focus, which is devoted to the stylistic development of the work, differently than the art-interested public. The chronological hanging of groups with great similarity offers experts the unique opportunity to carry out comparative considerations in front of originals. To the normal audience, however, the strictly comparative must appear more like constant repetition. Instead of a representative picture of the port in Antwerp from Braque’s Fauvist phase, there are four here, plus ports in southern France. And for the Cubist heyday from 1910, when the asceticism of recognizability led to an accordion looking like a garden fence, hands like sickles, faces like a scratched school desk and bodies like rocks in a thunderstorm mood, these are halls.
Georges Braque had already mastered abstraction with mastery between 1909 and 1910 with works such as “Piano and Mandola, Winter”.
(Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021 / bpk | The Solomon R. Guggenheim)
Compared to the Hamburg retrospective, which presented Braque as a versatile painter who, in the course of his eventful biography until his death in 1963, brought colorful influences from surrealism to pop art into dialogue with his ideas of modern art, the Düsseldorf show shows Braque a bit like one boring stylists. Especially since for younger visitors, who first have to be sensually brought closer to the explosive power of Braques and Picasso’s new formulation of painterly possibilities, this selection does not convey the message of what was actually so subversive and exciting about Cubism.
The fact that the picture gallery is supplemented with boxes that illuminate the exciting era before the First World War in great detail and sometimes with bizarre information increases the contrast to the gray-graphic core message of the show. In a time brimming with inventiveness, opulence, megalomania and social change before the violent fiasco of war, from which Braque returned with a shrapnel in his head, his influential search for multiple perspectives in art does not seem so groundbreaking and avant-garde here. More like the exhibition accompanying an art historians’ congress. But maybe it was also the specialist colleagues whose attention this exhibition was intended to arouse.
George Braque. Inventor of cubism. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K20, Düsseldorf, until January 23, 2022. The catalog costs 45 euros.