The Decline of Picasso, the Ascension of Braque: an Assisted Evolution

 Looking through an art book the other day—an inventory of the Masters of the 20c—I began to detect the beginning of the reputational decline of Picasso and the ascension of Braque, the artist who is reported to have said, ‘the only valuable thing in art is the thing you cannot explain’.

The decline took me back to Athens, not Paris, when I walked residential neighborhoods there, of which I would only remember the concrete, block after block of depressed gray International Style 1940s buildings. How disappointing it seemed, how bland, derivative, ugly for ugly’s sake—gray, cubist chunks of sameness, block after block, disorienting but not purposely disorienting in the way of Dada or Conceptual Art. The purpose, if there had actually been one, singular, was to house as many people as possible, as cheaply and efficiently as the state could manage.

I’d just come from the Acropolis, that temple of ancient modernity in which most of the wonderful life-sustaining myths of the western world—the notion of the Ideal, Poetry and Poetics, the great potential of and problems with Democracy—were cooked up, the stuff of childhood textbooks, and I was high with a renewed belief in mankind, though I could see, as any tourist might, that the place was in ruins.

Braque’s guitar, Hunter’s Point, San Francisco, August 27, 2021.