{"id":685,"date":"2011-10-26T12:13:14","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T12:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=685"},"modified":"2011-10-27T14:57:42","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:57:42","slug":"braques-world-population-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=685","title":{"rendered":"Braque’s world. Population: 1"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Braque's Billiard Table<\/p><\/div>\n

I spent years looking at reproductions of Bonnard\u2019s paintings and shrugging. I couldn\u2019t understand what made them work. All the praise was lost on me. Then, only a few years ago, I finally stopped in front of one at MoMA, startled by the immense complexity of its color. Now I get it.<\/em> Part of what woke me up was the depth of the paint: the intensity of his effort to apply color after color until he achieved something that just wouldn\u2019t sit still as you watched it\u2014and no reproduction even hinted at this shimmering complexity. A couple of days ago, I had an email debate with my cousin about how looking at a painting can be a tactile experience\u2014even if all you\u2019re doing is imagining how it would feel to touch it. Not only is that sense of a painting\u2019s surface an integral part of what it delivers to the viewer, it makes looking at the actual work imperative, because no affordable reproduction can convey surface texture and what it does to color. Photography doesn\u2019t even pretend to offer this sense of physical presence. Films and video are ghostly, a flickering sequence of disembodied shadows at the back of Plato\u2019s cave. Paintings are objects in the world, something that has a physical relationship to your body. He scoffed at all of this, implying that texture and dimension have no significance in a visual medium and that current technology can produce life-sized reproductions that would convey a sense of the painting\u2019s surface\u2014or at least deliver everything that \u201cmattered.\u201d I shot back that maybe he should get out of his house and visit a museum or two, and he sent a long list of major museums around the world he had frequented in his younger days. I gave up. As long as I\u2019ve known him, he\u2019s never been wrong about anything. Like my wife.<\/p>\n

Anyone who agrees with this kind of certainty about how painting works should check out the show of Braque canvases at Acquavella. It\u2019s a fairly significant assembly of this master\u2019s work, and it has a number of works from the middle of Braque\u2019s career, when his genius reached its peak. If nothing else it will prove that standing a foot away from an actual Braque is a revelatory experience\u2014he created objects, not just images, and they impart a sense of ancient provenance, with stratas of color like layers of sediment in rock. This is partly the result of the way Braque liked to mix sand into his paint, as if he were doing masonry. Like Burchfield, in America, Braque attempted to take painting into a region beyond the scope of painting, a territory populated, so far, by only one settler\u2014both artists pushed the art form toward something beyond depiction, submerging themselves in their work to the point where their paintings seem to be offspring of the natural world rather than symbols of it. Braque\u2019s genius was to make his images seem perfectly executed, down to the shape of every line, every color, every texture, when there\u2019s no rational explanation for this sense of perfection. The complexity of his images shouldn\u2019t work: they should seem ridiculously busy and cluttered, and yet they have a sense of invulnerable unity and repose. His work doesn\u2019t mimic the world, but extracts shapes and forms from it to create something that seems both incorporeal and musical and yet as invulnerable and fixed and heavy as the striations in sandstone or granite. Picasso wouldn\u2019t have had a clue how to reach the depths Braque excavated even on one of his off days. There\u2019s no way to recognize this dimension of Braque\u2019s work without seeing the paintings themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent years looking at reproductions of Bonnard\u2019s paintings and shrugging. I couldn\u2019t understand what made them work. All the praise was lost on me. Then, only a few years ago, I finally stopped in front of one at MoMA, startled by the immense complexity of its color. Now I get it. Part of what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBraque's world. Population: 1 - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=685\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Braque's world. Population: 1 - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I spent years looking at reproductions of Bonnard\u2019s paintings and shrugging. I couldn\u2019t understand what made them work. All the praise was lost on me. Then, only a few years ago, I finally stopped in front of one at MoMA, startled by the immense complexity of its color. Now I get it. 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