In Braque’s Studio

After Henri Matisse’s death in 1954, Georges Braque came to be recognized generally as the greatest living French painter. Picasso as a Spaniard was hors concours; and indeed in a very real way this is what he had been since he had ridden so quickly to fame in the first decade of the century. But already, before this, in the minds of some Braque was considered an artist superior to either Picasso or Matisse. In 1945 Jean Paulhan, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française and a minor collector, published an important book entitled Braque le Patron in which he stated, “Braque is the artist, without hesitation, whom I take as a Master.” Earlier, in 1932, he wrote to a friend, “Picasso makes so much noise that one loves Braque…for his silence, and finally because one imagines he knows so much more than the other.” Braque had long since been recognized internationally as a major artist, but his position in France was probably reinforced by the fact that when Matisse’s glorious late papiers découpés were shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1949, they were coolly viewed and were felt by many to show him falling off in old age. Although Picasso’s years with Françoise Gilot (1943–1953) saw his greatest activity in the fields of pottery and book illustration, his canvases of the time, with a few exceptions, did not rival in intensity those of preceding periods or of others that were to follow.

Ironically, Braque was awarded a state funeral in 1963—ironically because despite his elevated status he had become increasingly withdrawn in his later years and disliked and shunned public occasions. His catafalque was placed in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre; as Alex Danchev points out, this was appropriate in that it was oriented toward the church of Saint-Germaine-l’Auxerrois where Chardin, perhaps Braque’s favorite artist among his French predecessors, lies buried. The ceremony was conducted by torchlight, and although it was raining hard it attracted a crowd of several thousand. There were newsreel cameras present. Braque would have hated it all. A brass band played Beethoven’s Funeral March for the Death of a Hero. Braque loved music, both classical and popular, and he admired Beethoven; but the composer whom he had come to most revere in old age was Bach. As minister of cultural affairs André Malraux delivered a short oration which bore all the marks of being hastily scripted, possibly over a somewhat bibulous lunch.¹ The following day Braque’s body was conveyed to Varengeville, in his native Normandy, and buried in its small country church, adjacent to what had long since been Braque’s second home; in 1954 he had designed the stained-glass windows which we see there today.

No writer on Braque can afford to ignore his family background, and Alex Danchev, in his new biography, has much to say about it. Braque was born in 1882 in Argenteuil, a small town on the banks of the Seine, much loved by the Impressionists. His father and grandfather had been peintres décorateurs, decorators who produced those effects of illusion—false marble, imitation wood-graining, and so forth—so dear to the French middle classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Braque was apprenticed first to his father, and then, after the family’s move to Le Havre, to the firm of Rupalay et Rosney, famous for their trompe l’oeil illusions. Braque’s father was also a Sunday painter, mostly of landscapes, and in Le Havre father and son sometimes showed together in group exhibitions.

After Braque moved to Paris to be “finished” in the family profession he simultaneously took evening classes at the Cours Municipal of Batignolles and then at the Académie Humbert where he met Francis Picabia and the aspiring painter Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire’s mistress, who became a friend. Like every other artist with whom Apollinaire was connected, Braque agreed that the poet had little feeling or understanding for the visual arts. But Apollinaire championed Braque’s own painting, although he implicitly placed Picasso above Braque in the creation of Cubism, as countless fellow critics were to do. Braque was at this time a shy character, but personable, good-looking, tall, and athletic. He loved to sing and dance, and to box and fence. He made friends easily, yet there was always an aspect of his character that he kept to himself. It is revealing that in the two group portraits by Laurencin, of 1908 and 1909, which show her with Apollinaire and their mutual friends, Braque does not appear.

Despite an estrangement Laurencin remained loyal to Braque as an artist, always insisting that he was a better painter than Picasso. In the meantime Braque had long since settled down with Marcelle Lapré, a young woman introduced to him by Picasso, who was at home in bohemian circles and had modeled for Kees Van Dongen and Amedeo Modigliani (Braque used to get irritated when she expounded on the latter’s renowned beauty). She moved in with Braque in 1911 or 1912 and took his name although the couple did not get married until 1926. Theirs was to be the happiest of unions. Marcelle proved to be the perfect wife for a painter, supportive and understanding. They remained together until parted by death.

Braque had visited Paris and the Louvre on holidays while still a student at Le Havre, and once established in the capital he became familiar with Post-Impressionism. But his introduction to twentieth-century modernism came when he saw the controversial Fauve room at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. Braque entered the Fauve orbit in the company of Othon Friesz, an artist who failed to fulfill his early promise, and Raoul Dufy, whose subsequent ravishingly decorative canvases stood at the opposite end of the pole to Braque’s increasingly philosophical concerns. In comparison to the work of the original Fauves—Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck—Braque’s Fauvism relied less on the primary colors in favor of a more orchestrated palette and shows a gentler, at times almost tapestry-like respect for the breakdown of the picture surface. The works he showed at the Salon des Indépendents of 1907 brought him some recognition and a small commercial success.

Braque’s career was to take an altogether different path when he accompanied Apollinaire to visit Picasso in his studio in the Bâteau Lavoir in the late autumn of 1907. He had already met Picasso earlier in the year but he was now confronted in the studio by the Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was to affect so much subsequent painting. Though shocked by it Braque responded to the picture immediately, and he recognized more intelligently than any other artist that its real significance lay in the fact that Picasso had broken violently with the single-viewpoint perspective of Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. Braque began a large three-figure composition entitled La Femme (subsequently lost or more likely destroyed), implying by the title that the picture shows the same woman in different positions and from different angles. Another large multiple-viewpoint rendition of a single nude (1908) survives and is now in the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. His art had changed direction completely.

Danchev is not a didactic or aggressive writer. His style is supple and he bends it, perhaps unconsciously, to suit his arguments. Nevertheless he asserts, “If an ism can be said to be invented by a person, then Cubism was invented by Georges Braque.” This is an argument that has been made before, perhaps most cogently by the late William S. Rubin, verbally at least, although vestiges of it can also be picked up in the footnotes to the catalog to the magnificent “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism” exhibition mounted at MoMA in 1989. Walking around the exhibition with him while it was still being hung he confided in me that he had modified his views and now thought it best to accept both artists’ assertions that they had worked together as equals in what was to be a unique artistic partnership. If Picasso’s approach to adopting the multiview perspective that was central to Cubism was more incisive and daring than Braque’s, it was Braque who invented the space in which Cubist objects and figures could live and breathe. In one of the most revealing statements Braque ever made, he said:

There is in nature a tactile space, I might say even a manual space…. This is the space that fascinated me so much. Because that is what early Cubist painting was about, a research into space.

And it is true that although Braque became quintessentially a painter of still lifes, it is by studying Braque’s landscapes of 1908–1909 that we can most easily find our way into understanding the high, and to me, at least, infinitely mysterious Cubist pictures that were produced by both Braque and Picasso during 1910–1912, the moment when their collaboration was closest.

During the spring and summer of 1908 Braque executed a series of landscapes at L’Estaque, on the Mediterranean. Braque’s earlier L’Estaque paintings, dating to the autumn of 1907, are strongly Cézannesque; he had been bowled over by the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne of 1907, and Cézanne was to remain the most revered of his immediate predecessors. The new L’Estaque paintings show not so much a change of direction as a sharpening of means and an attempt to find new ways of exploring pictorial space: color is limited, and the contours of forms are more broken so that they flow into each other and their surroundings (the painters called this device “passage”). In this group of paintings objects depicted no longer stand behind one another but rather climb upward over the picture surface.

The paintings were rejected by the jury of the 1908 Salon d’Automne but were shown at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s new gallery that November, and they helped give Cubism its name. The first of the new L’Estaque paintings anticipate the paintings executed by Picasso at La Rue-des-Bois in the early autumn of 1908 and strongly resemble them.² The legendary collaboration was about to begin and Cubism had been born, although it didn’t reach its first point of full development until the following year. Braque himself always insisted that his Still Life with Musical Instruments of June 1908 was his first truly Cubist picture (see illustration on page 70). It shows a close-up view of three instruments and a sheet of music all intertwined and pressed forward to meet the spectator’s grasp. Braque kept the picture with him until his death.

Given Danchev’s desire to assert Braque’s supremacy in the creation of Cubism, it is perhaps surprising that he doesn’t make more of the fact that through the invention of papiers collés in 1912 Braque ushered in the second major phase of the movement. Picasso and Braque had been working together that summer in Sorgues, in the south. Danchev rehearses the well-known but revealing story of how the idea of papier collé came to Braque when he had seen a roll of imitation wood-grained paper in a shop. He bought some immediately, but shrewdly waited for Picasso’s return to Paris before incorporating three strips of it into a work entitled Fruit Dish and Glass; he was by now used to Picasso seizing his inventions and pushing them to more extreme conclusions. In Fruit Dish and Glass as in so many of Braque’s subsequent Cubist works, pencil marks indicate where flat abstract compositional shapes were to be placed. Subsequently subject matter, rendered either in charcoal or in oil paint, was superimposed over the composition and integrated into it.

So was the dialogue between abstraction and representation begun, a dialogue that was to be central to almost all Braque’s subsequent production. With his invention of papier collé the “Synthetic” phase of Cubism, as opposed to its first or “Analytic” one, was launched, and once again Cubism was challenging received notions of visual perception. If the first phase involved looking at the external world in a totally new way, in part by dissecting or “analyzing” a subject from many different viewpoints, the second was as much concerned with new ways of constructing art, in which various collage elements, or painted compositional shapes deriving from them, could be “synthesized” into a work to produce new effects.

Both world wars affected Braque deeply and Danchev—a professor of international relations who has written acclaimed biographies of military figures—is predictably informative on the artist’s experience of them. In the first Braque was indeed a hero. Almost mortally wounded in the vicious fighting for Neuville-Saint-Vaast in May 1915, he was trepanned and sent back to Paris to convalesce. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, first with bronze star, then elevated to “with palm,” and appointed Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. Understandably, during his continued convalescence and rehabilitation into civilian life Braque produced relatively little. Danchev gives space to the largest and most important of what might be described as the “rehabilitation” paintings, La Musicienne, of 1917–1918 (see illustration on page 68); at over seven feet high it was clearly Braque’s attempt to rival one of Picasso’s largest and most important wartime canvases, Seated Man (L’Homme accoudé) of 1916. Contemporary still lifes show Braque consulting the work of Juan Henri Gris and the sculptor Laurens.

As he detached himself from Picasso, Braque turned increasingly to Laurens for artistic friendship, and the Laurens family eventually became Braque’s heirs. But the split between the two creators of Cubism was never as radical as many writers have suggested, and Danchev records how their many encounters and visits to each other lasted throughout Braque’s lifetime. For Braque, convalescence had its positive side. He was meditating on what he called “the poetics of painting,” and in 1917 his “Pensées et réflexions sur la peinture” was published in Nord-Sud, the journal edited by his friend Pierre Reverdy, the critic who first recognized the achievements of Synthetic Cubism. Braque’s writing in this work—presenting a series of polished maxims about painting—reflects his natural affinities with Pascal’s Pensées and possibly the philosophical principles of Jansenism, the branch of Catholic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that stressed the unknowability of salvation while rigorously insisting on total moral rectitude.

Danchev devotes little space to the paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, an omission that seems strange until we dig further into his motives for writing on Braque. He had clearly been deeply moved by “Braque: The Late Works,” an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, in his generous terminology “master-minded” by myself.³ His reluctance to engage with the work of the middle periods is perhaps owing to his book’s aims as a straightforward biography. Having established Braque’s role in the creation of Cubism and his evolution during the Cubist years, Danchev devotes much of the following discussion to delving into the artist’s mind. And this he does by investigating Braque’s involvement with contemporary writers and poets and simultaneous immersion into literature of the past.

The factual details concerning Braque’s life are not all that interesting. He was a wholly consistent and steadfast man who as he aged became increasingly a philosopher in paint. There was no secret life other than the internal one; there are no murky or sensational events to be exposed, no infidelities, and relatively little travel (almost all of which was in any case within France). He lived contentedly in his studios and in his domestic life, cared for by his wife and their housekeeper, the ever faithful Mariette Lachaud, who became also his studio assistant. His work simply evolved at a steady pace, and he gained increasing international recognition and fame, which for the most part, he chose to ignore.

By 1918 Braque had once again found a totally personal voice, and over the next decade he produced some of his most striking and accessible works. The series of upright canvases of guéridons (pedestal tables on three legs) confirmed his reputation as a major artist when they were shown at Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1919. Braque’s standing was further enhanced when he was invited to show eighteen works at the Salon d’Automne of 1922. The same year he moved to Montparnasse, which had almost completely supplanted Montmartre as the most vital artistic quarter of Paris. By 1930 he was sufficiently affluent to move to the house and studio built for him by the distinguished architect Auguste Perret, to his own specifications. The quietly elegant bourgeois structure stands just off the fashionable Parc Montsouris, on what was then the rue du Douanier, now the rue Georges Braque.

The works of 1918–1928 are characterized by their striking use of blacks. Although difficult to use, black could in Braque’s hands (as in those of Matisse) become a color and, because of its naturally recessive properties, also be an agent in creating space. The blacks also enhance the somber but rich and varied tonalities of still lifes superimposed on top of them, relieved by flashes of white and cream which Braque referred to as “foyers d’intérêt.” The compositions, rendered in flat, overlapping, and interacting planes, are still a development of Synthetic Cubist methods; but now Braque was becoming interested in using differently textured surfaces to differentiate the interacting compositional elements: for example, a single painting can make use of various marbling effects.

In these works Braque makes his most overt display of his training as a peintre décorateur, a quality that accounts for their immediate appeal and has made them particularly sought after by dealers and collectors. The 1930s witnessed some of the most magnificently full and decorative still lifes of Braque’s, and indeed of the entire twentieth century. The color range is extended to include a spectrum of reds and roses and yellows, and the gamut of tonal variety in the pale fawns and up into the siennas and browns becomes ever richer. The wealth of pattern, some of it inspired by that found on Etruscan pottery, which Braque greatly admired, now often reads as a hieroglyphic, secret painterly script.

Another notable addition to the work of the Thirties is the liberal use of curves. These can be rendered in a linear fashion, and played off against angular pictorial elements to create new and complex spatial effects, and above all the “metamorphic confusion” that was becoming increasingly insistent in Braque’s aesthetic. Solid objects such as musical instruments deliquesce, while softer ones (napkins and fruits, for example) become hard and unyielding. Braque was becoming obsessed, too, by what he called “rhyming” shapes: a pulpy guitar echoes a curvilinear compotier, while the round fruit it contains picks up in turn on the sounding hole of the guitar. Many of the works painted toward the end of the decade, in their complexity and ambiguity, look forward to the deeper philosophical questions about different forms of reality that preoccupied him in his late career.

In 1928, while visiting Varengeville, near Dieppe, on the Normandy coast, Braque decided to build a second home there. He chose as architect Paul Nelson, an American who had studied in Paris under Perret. Nelson had a few heady ideas for the project, but Braque insisted on a spacious comfortable dwelling in the local architectural style, with the studio as a separate building beside it. A second, larger studio was added in 1949. The studios in both Paris and Normandy were filled with easels, some of them of Braque’s own making; he also carved his own palettes.

The easels were sometimes arranged in an arc so that he could study earlier work simultaneously with what was in progress. As opposed to most artists who prefer to work in a northern, unyielding light, Braque liked to paint in a soft, shifting one; his studio windows faced south and were equipped with long, relatively heavy muslin curtains which could control the flood of natural light. In his late years as his health failed, the studios were equipped with couches; his periods of rest were also intervals of study and profound meditation.

In an original and informative essay for the catalog of “Braque: The Late Works,” Sophie Bowness notes that Braque told John Richardson in 1957 that the French poets have been particularly helpful at adding to the general obscurity of art. The obscurity, suggestion, mystery, and metamorphosis Braque sought in his painting were all for him associated with poetry, and Bowness concentrates on the four contemporary major literary figures she sees as being most relevant to Braque’s art. The poet Pierre Reverdy was the oldest and closest of his friends; it was partly through Reverdy that Braque learned to express his own thoughts in condensed aphorisms. Also influential were the writers Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge. In 1945 Ponge had been taken to Braque’s studio by Paulhan, who had known Braque for many years, and Ponge considered the visit to be one of the highlights of his life.

It was with Paulhan and Laurens that Braque was able to converse most freely on matters both aesthetic and personal. Braque gave Paulhan a painting of 1942, The Black Fish, which Paulhan treasured. Braque was to inspire some of Ponge’s poetry, and he collaborated with Ponge on the prose-poem “Cinque Sapates” of 1950, contributing five illustrations to go with Ponge’s deceptively simple, evocative, and magical language. René Char, another younger friend, wrote sensitively and empathetically on Braque and like Ponge accepted him as a mentor. The last and most important collaboration between Char and Braque, Lettera Amorosa, was published in 1963, just before Braque’s death. Yet despite his insistence on “poetry,” Braque used the word generically, and always asserted his allegiance to painting’s autonomy.

Danchev refers repeatedly to all these figures and he enlarges on the part they played in enriching Braque’s intellectual life. By his own admission, in his youth Braque had not been a great reader, but his early contact with Apollinaire had a considerable part in widening his literary horizon.⁴ During his career he was influenced by a growing number of writers and poets, from Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé to Baudelaire and Chateaubriand.⁵ In the early 1930s he illustrated Hesiod’s Theogony (in my view not altogether successfully); in conversation he compared Hesiod to Aeschylus and Sophocles.

But among the countless writers mentioned by Danchev, possibly the most important to an understanding of Braque’s philosophy in his later years, and hence to the formation of his late manner and aesthetic, was his discovery of the sages and mystics of the East: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Milarepa.⁶ He denied being influenced by Zen Buddhism but, perhaps unconsciously, it is there. To celebrate the liberation of Paris he gave a copy of Zen in the Art of Archery to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who acknowledges that it had a profound effect on him. Toward the end of his life Braque seemed to show these Eastern influences in his own thinking. “You see I have made a great discovery,” he said.

I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence—what I can only describe as a state of peace—which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a revelation. That is true poetry.

Although Braque was not much interested in politics, premonitions of war saddened and depressed him. Single skulls first appear in his work in 1937, and they persist throughout the war, often in the form of vanitas or memento mori. When the German forces advanced into France he stopped painting for a while. The Braques then fled south to Bordeaux, to find Paul Rosenberg, brother to Léonce, who had briefly established himself there and to whom they handed over a stack of Varengeville canvases to be deposited in a bank vault. Mariette, though frightened, was holding the fort in the Paris house in predictably staunch fashion. Braque had left instructions to destroy all his paintings should the Germans come knocking. Instead she removed them from their stretchers and rolled them, in preparation for a quick escape. (When Braque saw what she had done for him, he wept.) Eventually the Braques with Mariette and her mother headed south again to find sanctuary with the latter’s family in La Valade. After further peregrinations the Braques returned to Paris to find that the German officers stationed in the house opposite had in fact entered theirs, but the only object they had stolen was Braque’s much-prized accordion.

Braque resumed work. If his experience of the First World War had forced upon him a new, expectant self-awareness, the second encouraged a withdrawal into himself. His new interiors depict kitchens and bathrooms, the only rooms that it was possible to heat, however inadequately; they emanate a feeling of loneliness and isolation. The still lifes based in these interiors suggest that food was scarce; the depiction of a single fish partakes of the sacrificial, the coal bucket is empty, palettes look like skulls. The war paintings comment indirectly and movingly on the human condition in adversity, on man’s ability to endure, to perform basic daily functions under extreme privation. Braque, like Picasso, had become a symbol of dignified resistance to the occupation.

The final twenty years of Braque’s activity as a painter were dominated by three series of predominantly large canvases: the Billiard Tables, executed between 1944 and 1952, the Ateliers or Studios of 1949–1956, and the last valedictory Bird paintings that succeeded them. All of them in different ways enlarge on Braque’s lifelong obsession with pictorial space—space that had by now taken on a metaphysical character. The idea of painting billiard tables might at first seem strange, particularly since there were no billiard tables in either of Braque’s houses and his prowess at the game was questionable. But the idea of confronting and inscribing large, massive and intractable horizontal surfaces onto upright two-dimensional supports must have come as a particular challenge.

The last painting of the series is the largest and most daring. The table’s contours, bisected and cracked upward, shift and sway, and the whole subject has, as it were, been put out to sea. Here Braque has reached what he called “le climat,” a state in which all forms and space become malleable. The billiard cues, now vestigial, continue to invite the spectator to pick them up and strike the balls. The dado, on the wall behind, weaves through the table, and above it multiple and prominent boomerang shapes sweep forward, and read like a flock of birds. They advance in the same measure that the table and the floor beneath it recede. The deliberate, metamorphic ambiguity of the imagery, and the creation of a complex space that seems almost to liquefy before our eyes, into which we visually feel ourselves plunging, associates this picture with his subsequent Studio paintings. It is to these that Danchev makes most frequent reference.

The pivotal part that Braque had in the creation of Cubism must always count as his greatest achievement; through it he succeeded in influencing the course of twentieth-century art. But within the evolution of his own art, which was on the whole remarkably free from outside visual influences, the late Ateliers must be regarded as his supreme achievement. Braque’s friend Jean Leymarie in a relatively recent book refers to them as “les ateliers symphoniques.” Studio I of 1949 stands apart from the main body of the series, and can be regarded as an introduction or frontispiece. It is relatively small compared to the succeeding pictures and its iconography is limited. To the bottom left is an ornate, traditional frame, referring perhaps to painting of the past. Next to it is an unframed canvas, Braque’s own Pichet noir et citrons, at the time nearing completion; this is painting of the present. Behind it, placed on a stool or chair, is another picture depicting a single jug; despite the rightness of its placing it looks flat and unfinished and may be an unconscious reference to painting of the future.

Studio II, also of 1949, introduces the true series. It consists of eight works and occupied Braque through to 1956. All of the Studios are of horizontal format, except one that is markedly vertical and the last one, which is just off the square and differs from the others in having a somewhat apocalyptic air. Yet the series as a whole is remarkably homogeneous, despite the distinctive character of each canvas. These are paintings of the utmost gravity. They radiate a sense of calm and are designed for lengthy contemplation. In each the entire space of a large studio has been accordion-pleated up onto the picture surface to produce spatial sensations hitherto unknown to art. The space, though dense, is comprehensible—it envelopes us completely and reassures us. There is a sense in which the paintings are foundries in which space is melted, folded, bent, and shaped.

Space is now what Braque would have described as truly “manual”; our eyes touch it, handle and fashion it, and we experience it in a manner comparable to that of diving into and through a large tank of water or a swimming pool. Because of the studio objects—palettes, easels, brushes, and plaster casts of classical female heads—these pictures comment on the very act of painterly creation. In all but one a mysterious, gigantic bird is impaled on a canvas that is, by implication, standing on an easel. Simultaneously these mythical creatures appear to glide forward effortlessly; in doing so they, too, inform us of the metaphysical processes contained in a painter’s working space. “Braque was less concerned with birds, as such,” Danchev writes,

than with the miracle of winged flight; that is, with movement in space, progress through a resistant medium. “The bird is a summing up of all my art,” Braque told Alexander Liberman as they contemplated The Bird and Its Nest. “It is more than painting.” “It has a hypnotic power,” said Liberman. “That’s it,” Braque responded immediately. “It’s as if one heard the fluttering of wings.”

In Studio V a real bird has flown in and perched on top of an easel, while its large, shadowy counterpart floats behind it.

The bird paintings have attracted a considerable body of literature and controversy. Some critics simply cannot take them. Hilton Kramer has written, “In these pictures it is not their hermeticism that I find problematic but just the opposite: their unwonted simplification and vacancy.”⁷ Yet it is precisely these qualities, if one takes vacancy actively, to mean the conscious search to empty things out, to explore a space made blank, that I find so moving. But I would agree that there is a very real way in which they defy critical analysis. In 1938 Braque wrote to Leymarie about his fascination with the spatial implications of the flight of birds. Later, in conversation with John Richardson, Braque talked about how he was inspired by the sight of pink flamingos of the Camargue taking flight over a lagoon, flapping low across the marshy territory below. Attempting to convey the meaning of these works, a critic can only take refuge in what Braque once said: “Only one thing in art is valid, that which cannot be explained.”

Many commentators, including Danchev, have drawn parallels between Braque’s last works and the aristocratic, often hermetic verse of Saint-Jean Perse, whose L’Ordre des Oiseaux, published in 1962, included color etchings by Braque. Perse’s ode to birds was written mostly before he met Braque, but was subsequently dedicated to him. Danchev reproduces a photograph of the first meeting between painter and poet, with Paulhan in attendance; it shows Perse silhouetted against The Bird and Its Nest of 1955, a work Braque regarded as a personal talisman. Braque and Perse never got to know each other well, yet there was an instant rapport between them. Of Braque Perse said, “For my part, I saw nothing but nobility; and this distant flash of a dream that seemed to describe, uninterruptedly, a progression of inalienable things.”