Braque: The painter's painter, in New York

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso are forever linked as the artists who jointly produced the short-lived but glorious style known as analytic Cubism, in which familiar objects are broken down into planar fragments that simultaneously conceal their identities and reveal their underlying structures. Their paths diverged after this intense collaboration, during which, as Braque later remarked, the two artists were "roped together" as closely as climbers on a mountain.

Picasso, ever restless and experimental, periodically reinvented his style, incorporating the latest artistic movements as they emerged while ransacking past tradition, as if to reflect the entire history of Western art through a single hand. Braque, in contrast, settled on a modified Cubism that served him for the rest of his days, and found, like his master Cézanne, almost everything he needed in the objects and surroundings of his studio.

Connoisseurs have a hard time distinguishing some of Picasso's Cubist compositions of 1910-11 from Braque's. When you're punching at the same weight as the man generally regarded as the artist of the century, you're hitting the bag hard. But Braque (1882-1963) has settled in as the Joe Frazier to Picasso's Muhammad Ali, a man forever in the shadow of a more variously gifted and dynamic personality.

Picasso exhibitions are an annual, not to say an almost continuous phenomenon, but Georges Braque hadn't had a New York retrospective since 1988 when the Acquavella Gallery mounted its current show. It's modest in scale— 41 works in all— and, covering almost Braque's entire 60-year career, it's more a sample than a comprehensive overview. But to extend our boxing metaphor a bit, it's a knockout.

Studio as subject

The show includes half a dozen Fauvist landscapes, the last of which, Houses at L'Estaque, shows the simplified forms of Braque's incipient Cubism. The largest single section covers the first Cubist decade from 1909 to 1919, a period interrupted by war service in which Braque sustained serious wounds. This group includes several of the masterpieces— Piano and Mandola; The Mantelpiece; Still Life with Metronome; Rooftops at Céret— in which Braque and Picasso worked in tandem, and almost as one.

In some ways, this early, heroic Cubism was an apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, with its evocation of musical drawing rooms and domestic performances; but it was also in very obvious ways a deconstruction of bourgeois life. Picasso's always-Leftist politics fit in with this mischievous, not to say subversive intent, but Braque's interests remained, like those of Matisse (some of whose key works of the period also feature musical motifs), largely formal.

Picasso would return to the studio in the dark days of World War II, but Braque seldom left it. Like Chardin and Morandi, he found essentially what he needed there.

The studio is, of course, an artist's performative space, and so it's often enough his subject too. Picasso's studio paintings of the 1940s, with their skulls, guts and garishly splintered lighting, clearly expressed the horror and privation of the war, as Philip Guston's studio paintings of the 1970s reflected his response to Nixon's America.

Adventures in brushwork

But the political climate doesn't register in Braque. The physical properties of ordinary objects— their ever-varied forms, perspectives and colors— are enough to compel his attention and constitute his artistic world. When you enter it, you find a painter's painter whose canvases are a complexly overlapping web of patterns and relations, revealing the inexhaustibility of the commonplace.

All this is anchored in a palette of surpassing richness, particularly in its darker hues, for Braque was one of the 20th Century's great colorists: less warm than Matisse, less brash than Picasso, but stroke by stroke, panel by panel, his brushwork is a feast and an adventure. Many learned from him, too; I think of the early Brice Marden in particular.

There is, it is true, a somewhat hieratic quality to Braque, most evident in works that incorporate the female figure, such as the current exhibition's Woman with a Mandolin and Woman at an Easel. The contrast with Picasso is perhaps most evident here.

Like a karate chop

Picasso's whole artistic impulse derived from the human form, and human expressiveness was his single most dominant aim. Braque is mostly content with the indirect human presence suggested by the fact of the studio itself, and when he introduces a figure it is simply as one object among others, interesting not as personality but as form.

This doesn't mean that emotion and even violence are absent from Braque's work; one of his great late paintings, The Billiard Table (1944-52), breaks up space as forcibly as a karate chop, and his flattened surfaces set up a tension that keeps the eye from resting placidly on even the most formal arrangement.

Georges Braque was a master; and, with all due regard for Dubuffet and others, French painting hasn't produced his equal in the years since his death. His name has faded here, but his place in art history is secure. Aquavella's choice show demonstrates why.