LYING TO TELL THE TRUTH

GEORGES BRAQUE, THE ROUND TABLE, 1929

(Phillips Collection, Washington)

If Picasso is the twentieth century’s Dionysus, Braque is its Apollo; if Picasso is a Beethoven of painting, Braque is a Mozart; if Picasso is James Joyce, Braque is Samuel Beckett; if Picasso is Ovid, Braque is Vergil; if Picasso is Aristotle, Braque is Plato; if Picasso is Walt Whitman, Braque (believe it or not) is Emily Dickinson; if Picasso is modern art’s Michelangelo, Braque is its Raphael... We could play this game forever and say nothing substantial about the works of either artist. It is Georges Braque’s colossal bad luck to be forever linked by art history to his partner-in-Cubism, to perpetually play hedgehog to the Spaniard’s wily fox. (I believe Robert Hughes was the first to invoke this delightfully appropriate Isaiah Berlin-based analogy.) One problem with most of these comparisons is that they suggest equality–of talent and of achievement. While Braque may be Picasso’s complement, even his opposite, he is not Picasso’s equal. No twentieth-century artist is. Picasso stands astride modern art like a colossus, fundamentally revolutionizing both painting and sculpture (not to mention graphic arts and ceramics), and his life is a tale of repeated self-invention: now a Cubist, now a Neoclassicist, now a Surrealist, now a short, horny old man capable of combining any of his previous styles at will. Braque, by contrast, is a more restrained, focused, self-limited artist. Comparing his later works to Picasso’s is like–well, like comparing Beckett’s novels (great in their own way) to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While Picasso’s life after Cubism is characterized by frequent metamorphoses, Braque spends the rest of his life cultivating the Cubist garden, creating canvases of great, harmonious beauty and sometimes mind-boggling complexity.

Because Braque’s work and life took a conservative turn after World War One (in which he was wounded in the head), there is a tendency to compare his paintings of the 1920's and 30's to the great eighteenth-century still lifes of Chardin, to try to fit this iconoclast who was a Cubist for most of his life into the Grand Tradition of French painting, into the ranks of the approved and Louvred. (In fact, the only twentieth-century painting in the Louvre today is a panel by Braque installed in the ceiling of one of the galleries.) While I think the Chardin comparison has merit, I want to take a different tack in my discussion of one of the period’s greatest Braques, 1929's The Round Table. Since the conservative Chardin would no more have accepted this painting as his prodigy than the conservative Cézanne would have acknowledged Cubism as anything more than an ugly stepchild, I want to look at The Round Table as an entirely modern work, as modern as any Braque, early or late, and a worthy successor to his revolutionary canvases of 1908-14.

The Round Table is large for a still life (about 5 feet tall) and decidedly top-heavy. When hung too high it looms over the viewer, but not in an aggressive way. It’s a cool, mellow painting, not hot and metamorphic like Picasso’s works of the period. (If Picasso is a Spanish summer, Braque is a French fall–Stop it!) We might call it jazzy, but it’s French jazzy, more Django Reinhardt than Louis Armstrong. Its soft, gentle color harmonies invite contemplation. We notice how various shades of brown, from light tan to rich chocolate, play off of one another and how the painting’s only patch of cobalt blue is placed perfectly at the left edge of the table, where it both complements the background orange and sets the brown guitar off from the tabletop. We also notice how the sand that Braque adds to his pigments gives the paint a rough, grainy, pitted texture that, spread across the entire canvas, emphasizes the flatness of the surface and is a constant reminder that the painted objects, for all their legibility and integrity, are an elaborately worked illusion. We look at these objects: a guitar, a pipe, a bottle, sheet music. The usual suspects. Braque has been playing variations on these themes for two decades now, and while this work lacks the in-your-face pictorial radicalism of his 1911 Pedestal Table, where a violin is represented by a fragmented field of signs (scroll, tailpiece, etc.) that viewers must mentally combine into the concept ‘violin,’ long study shows me that The Round Table may be equally radical, but in a subtler, more insinuating way. Like all great still lifes, it is a work in which the simplest, most mundane objects are granted an astonishing complexity. The crucial modern difference here is that this complexity is found not in what the objects represent but in how that representation is accomplished. Every object in this painting, I will argue, can be seen to deconstruct itself, to reveal itself as a constructed illusion even as it perpetuates that illusion. Every single thing in the painting (and the painting as a whole) is both a pictorial representation and a deconstruction of representation.

Beginning at the easily overlooked bottom of the painting, we see three legs and a pedestal that are immediately recognizable as such even though they are painted in near-perfect flatness. In a sneak preview of the double state of mind in which we must appreciate the entire work, we simultaneously believe that the form supports the table and realize that something this thin and flimsy could obviously support nothing. The pedestal thrusts out its legs like a modern dancer, planting its feet firmly against the bottom edge. The lower part of its body looks like a whimsical wide-open mouth, and above it the fluting is drawn like a series of Romanesque arches that surprisingly seem to open into deeper, shadowed space. But this illusion is promptly shattered by the flat rectangle on top, a shape further flattened (like the rest of the table) by its transparently phony scratched lines of imitation woodgrain–like much else in this painting, we see it, but we can’t possibly believe it. To the left of the rectangle, an orange plane locks the pedestal into the back wall (an effect heightened by the dado line continuing the bottom edge of the rectangle) and flattens the space of the entire painting into a single vertical plane containing wall, floor and pedestal–a plane that evokes the flat reality of the painted canvas itself.

Directly above this flat passage is a complex of knife, pipe and apples that seems remarkably straightforward and traditional (if we allow for the decidedly untraditional tilt of the tabletop). The objects look so realistic in this context that only after a moment do their instabilities become apparent. Could the knife’s blade really rest on the side of the apple if its handle is already partly over the table’s edge? Even if the pipestem could balance on the knife, how long would its bowl defy gravity by remaining upright? The illusion doesn’t hold, and that’s exactly the point of the passage. Braque’s unstable illusion is intended to show us the mechanisms by which painters trick us into seeing space. It causes us to reflect on the unconscious, internalized pictorial conventions that allow us to be deceived. The pipe only appears to occupy a space above the blade because Braque has used its stem to bisect the blade and has painted the pipe’s shadow on the blade and tabletop. The shadow is patently unreal, surrounding the pipe like a halo and at its darkest where the object appears farthest from the tabletop (a direct violation of observed reality, where a shadow lightens as its object moves away from it), but no matter. If our eyes see a shadow, our mind, trained by centuries of painted trickery, sees a space. By the same unconscious rules, we read the knife as resting atop the apple and see enough space for three objects where no space exists save a thin layer of paint spread across canvas. This material reality is foregrounded throughout the passage by the rough texture of Braque’s paint, a texture shared by knife, pipe and apples. By visually ‘marking’ his paint with sand, Braque keeps it constantly before our eyes as paint and thus undermines his own illusion by denying his painted apples the smooth texture we associate with the fruit. Braque’s apples, at first so realistic, now appear flat and anything but tasty.

The carefully (albeit transparently) constructed three-dimensionality of the pipe and apples contrasts sharply with the largest and most complex object on the table, the trademark Braque guitar. The extremely flat, stunted neck and head of this guitar take us back to the distortions of earlier Cubism. One wonders if it would be recognizable at all were it not attached to the guitar-shaped body. This big, bifurcated body is more in tune with the rest of the painting: it is an entirely legible but self-deconstructing object. It is so obviously a constructed, unstable thing, so obviously sutured together out of parts that don’t fit, that we can only see it as a metaphor for the constructed nature of the painting as a whole. The guitar’s lower side wavers in perpetual ambiguity between two and three dimensions. Do we see it as a perspective construction showing the depth of the body or as the guitar’s side Cubistically flattened onto the picture plane? The left half encourages a perspective reading, while the right half takes us back to flatness at its intersection with the newspaper. (The newspaper itself is a curious object. Seeming simultaneously to exist in space and to be locked into the plane of the tabletop, it is both simple and simply impossible.) We see the lower guitar as both solid and flat, a synthesis of opposites that characterizes the object as a whole. While the disparity between the bottom half’s smooth curves and mellow colors and the top’s sharper angles and stark black and white tends to pull the guitar apart, this duality of form also, unexpectedly, harmonizes the guitar with other objects that play off curved contours against straight or angled ones (newspaper, knife, pedestal). In this context the guitar is able to combine formal integrity with wild instability, construction with deconstruction–a synthesis epitomized by its exceptionally odd soundhole. I use the word ‘soundhole’ even though it’s nothing of the sort. (This is the way we always speak about objects in paintings. Braque’s deformations force into consciousness the fact that we are speaking of illusory representations of objects, not material objects themselves.) A guitar’s soundhole, as everyone knows, is circular, deep and shadowed. In an exact reversal of this convention, Braque’s hole is a broken, asymmetrical oval painted flatly in white with another broken oval contour inscribed within. We shouldn’t see it as a hole at all; it should provoke our disbelief and rip the entire guitar apart. Instead, it helps bring the two disparate halves of the guitar together by stating the color and style of the upper half in the lower. Nor should we overlook the fact that our desire to see an expected form–a rounded soundhole–tends to draw together what Braque has kept carefully apart. The two sections of the soundhole, these virtually abstract, flat passages of paint, are like the teeth of a zipper holding the entire guitar together.

Since the guitar is so interesting, we might not immediately notice that Braque has omitted its strings. Fortunately, the parallel lines that are the Cubist shorthand for guitar strings appear in the nearby open book in the guise of musical staves. After the complexities of the guitar, the book and bottle seem simple and familiar, like old friends that have wandered in from a 1914 Synthetic Cubist canvas. They are flattened, stylized, harmonized in form and color with the rest of the painting, and not terribly interesting. The open music book, however, provides a clue to understanding the larger but similar forms that dominate the upper painting. These strange, curved, colored planes look like nothing we recognize from previous art. They look like nothing other than very large sheets of construction paper that have been unfolded and flattened in the corner of the room; or more accurately, these sheets have, somehow, become the corner of the room. The vertical seam that divides them and continues, with slight displacements, through the table and down to the bottom of the painting is like a giant fold along which the entire work can be imaginatively closed and opened, like the book on the table. This painting can be opened like a book; it can be laid flat on a tabletop. With this realization The Round Table, for all its magnitude, takes on the character of a child’s thing: it has the appearance, fragility and complexity of a paper construction in a gigantic pop-up book.

But before we close the book, there is more meaning to be gathered from these planes that fill the upper canvas. I think they are Braque’s way of both materializing and deconstructing the very concept of painted space. Having spent the rest of the work dematerializing painted objects, he now shifts gears and gives form to invisibility. Where traditional artists take the space they construct somewhat for granted, seeing it as an emptiness in which objects rest, Braque turns painted space into a visible, material thing, a palpable form. And the form he gives it is paper. Braque visualizes painted space, the illusion fundamental to all pictorial representation since Giotto, as thin, bendable, foldable, artificial paper. Space, like paper, is a man-made thing; artists can fold and unfold it at will, manipulate it to deceive the viewer into seeing representations as objects and lines on canvas as shapes and voids in space. Even here, in this completely deconstructive painting, in this attempt to paint the truth, we are deceived when we see these paper shapes themselves as forms in space, curved and foldable. And this may be the final irony of Braque’s deconstruction: to bring the constructed nature of pictorial space before our eyes, he must give it form (a paper-thin, artificial form, but a form), and in so doing he perpetuates the very deception he exposes. Even a self-deconstructing representation remains a representation, even a Cubistically distorted object remains an object–in space.

A work that abstracts recognizable forms while giving form to abstractions, The Round Table takes us deep into the paradoxes of painting. It shows us that space is flatness; that the more realistic an object looks, the more deceptive it is; that apparent solidity is actually flimsy enough to be rolled up like a scroll and stored with other canvases. Braque toils in representation, a place where, by definition, illusion displaces reality, and he struggles not to deceive. Accordingly, he constructs his work in a way that transparently lies, that is obviously impossible. He knows that the only truthful representation is one that deconstructs itself, turns itself inside out and shows us the gears and wires inside, the flatness and paint under the illusion of space and objects. And yet as long as Braque paints objects (and he has no desire to make abstract pictures), he remains caught up in the most basic pictorial deception. This pipe is not a pipe (as Magritte would say); this guitar is not a guitar. The only way to approach the truth in painting, it seems, is to build your work out of an assortment of bald-faced lies, untruths so unsubtle that the attentive viewer can only see the deception, know himself deceived, and ask why, eventually penetrating to the true heart of pictorial falsehood. The Round Table is truthful only because it cannot be believed.

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