The calm and solid Cubist

The personalities of only a handful of artists are known to the public at large. Most live on through their work with, perhaps, a ticket of biographical cliché attached to their reputation — Van Gogh’s ear, Lautrec’s legs, Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in a storm. A few are known through the distortions of the biopic — Michelangelo, Gauguin, Pollock. With others, the very sparseness of available human detail — about Piero or Vermeer, for example —becomes their name tag. Of the great names of 20th-century art, Georges Braque is still among the unknown personalities. This problem is addressed in Alex Danchev’s very welcome, readable biography. It draws a convincing portrait of a painter at the centre of 20th-century creativity who refused worldliness and invasive celebrity and who seems to have had nothing to hide but his work.

Braque’s name is prominent in all the histories of modern art and he has been the subject of many monographs and exhibitions (although a searching, up-to-date retrospective of his whole career is much needed). But this elusive son of an Argenteuil house-painter has remained a shadowy presence akin to the grey silhouetted figure in his ‘Man with a Guitar’. Although from time to time Braque recorded some of the events of his life, mainly in late interviews, he left behind no personal archive of great substance. We must be grateful for Picasso’s policy of throwing nothing away, for several of Braque’s letters and cards to him from their early friendship have survived. In the face of this thin documentation, Danchev had a difficult task on hand, for this was never going to be a ‘what-Braque-had-for-breakfast-lunch-dinner’ biography, nor would it have the sweep, for example, of John Richardson’s multi-volumed Picasso. The author takes a circuitous route. Rather like one of those archetypal Cubist figures — ‘Man with a Pipe’ or ‘Woman with a Mandolin’ — which, at first glance, scarcely disclose the subject portrayed, Braque emerges here from a collage of fact and information, sideways views and chronological elasticity, as a solid human being.