One of my high school English teachers, an amateur film historian, had the opportunity to interview Ginger Rogers before she died.  Out of respect for her accomplishments, he didn’t ask her any questions about Fred Astaire.  That’s a little what the museum-worthy Georges Braque show at the Acquavella Gallery is like.  It’s trying so hard to establish Braque’s reputation as a solo artist (it’s called Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism), that it leaves out Picasso, who’s mentioned only briefly in the wall texts.  That omission makes the other painter’s presence even more palpable.

The work is hung chronologically in three separate galleries, with the largest, middle gallery given over to the iconic cubist works Braque completed in tandem with Picasso.  Seeing Braque’s work alone, from one phase to the next, gives a clear sense of his personal journey.  In this context the cubist works that incorporate newsprint and wallpaper, corrupting the sacrosant field of picture, seem freshly revolutionary.  And the exhibit allows one to see more clearly the character of Braque’s work, particularly it’s turbulent spatiality.  Picasso’s imagination was a plastic one, so that even his drawings and paintings possess an indelible, immediate sculptural force.  There’s a sense of spatial ease in Braque’s early, lyrical Fauvist canvases (which are reproduced poorly on the gallery’s website), but his late, post-cubist canvases are murky and occluded.  This is something different from subjects crowding the canvas in horror vacui, and from subjects stepping out from illusory space into real space.  This is the pressured, jumbled world of the painting – packed with objects, patterns, and visual scraps – pushed out into the real world.  The rupture in these canvases is unseemly, unlike the playful, gracious spatial ambiguities in the painter’s cubist works.  Perhaps Braque was searching for some kind of logic altogether outside of painting.