Review of Georges Braque: a Methodical Adventure by Pierre Reverdy
Georges Braque: A Methodical Adventure
by Pierre Reverdy, translated from the French by Andrew Joron and Rose Vekony
Black Square Editions 2021
Friendship in art, art in friendship. Sharing in that mysterious attraction towards confronting existence by committing oneself to artistic creation regularly brings artists together. Especially when you’re young and only just starting to develop as an artist, having like-minded company buoyed by mutual respect and admiration makes all the difference. In Paris during the tumultuous years surrounding WWI, a number of young artists, painters, and poets came upon one another’s company just as their art began to flourish. This was the foundation on which Cubism and Dadaism were built, and it led directly to the activities embodied by Surrealism. The poet Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960) was at the center of this frenzied mingling, co-founding the journal Nord-Sud in 1917, and right there in the mix with him was the painter Georges Braque (1882–1963).
Written in 1946, decades after the start of their friendship, Reverdy’s Georges Braque: A Methodical Adventure looks back with a critical eye, plumbing the depths not of recollection or reverie but rather taking measure from a later stage of life to determine what makes for affinity between artists. Reverdy explores the reasons why he values the work of his lifelong friend, leading to broader questions regarding the nature of his own insight into Braque’s artistic practice. He wonders “whether the knowledge of painting starts with the man or with the painting, and whether the knowledge of the man comes from the painting or from reality.” It demonstrates Reverdy’s discernment regarding creative engagement and the vital role art serves in his friendship. He values the work as testament that Braque the man, the artist, exists —“something marvelous here: it’s that behind the painting, the result, there has always been someone in the world who made it” — yet emphasizes that the work overrides any other sense of personal connection between the two men: “all I know of him are the paintings.”
December 1917 issue of Reverdy’s literary magazine, Nord-Sud, featuring Braque’s reflections on painting. Edition-Originale.
Reverdy’s text is an investigation into aesthetic theory, a statement of his beliefs concerning humanity’s compulsion to create art and its necessary bearing on our relationship to nature. He is, however, well aware of the crux our compulsion reveals. Always insisting on our own order by way of making art, we overlay a human vision upon our surroundings, never wholly one with the natural order:
Man is an aesthetic animal — moral and immoral, but aesthetic — and the only one who, to improve his existence, needs to enliven the walls of his dwelling with pictures, the only one whose ability to survive in nature depends on the anti-natural component he brings to it.
Braque’s art, for Reverdy, is not finally drawn from or fully owes its existence to the everyday world. It comes only from within Braque, composed from his unique abilities and insights which Reverdy on his own does not have any way to access. The stimulus Reverdy receives from Braque’s work is unavailable from any other source, including Braque himself. Apart from his work, Reverdy’s memory of Braque has little to offer.
As for the object that Braque projects on his canvas, I want it to appeal not to my hand, which would be useless there, but to my mind. Whether a glass or a fish, what matters is its being inscribed in my mind with the marks of Braque’s thinking about that sort of object; and, for the eye, its being a beautiful red or a lovely form that the object in its natural state wouldn’t show me and that I would not be capable of inventing myself — ultimately telling me what Braque thinks about the role a glass or a fish could play in painting. Thus a very particular and intimate kind of conversation begins. One more important than it may seem, because these objects are not and can never be found anywhere else in the world than on Braque’s canvas, inscribed there by Braque and no one else. And here the miraculous transmutation takes place: they are Braque. And what they bring to me of Braque is something Braque could not deliver by any other means, not by speech, not by writing, not by the free gesture of his hands.
Georges Braque, Bottle and Fishes, c. 1910-12. Oil on canvas. Tate.
“They are Braque.” Reverdy’s old pal is nothing to him but the art he produces. That is Reverdy’s ultimate measure of friendship. This is not at all impersonal or bloodless. This is what friendship between two artists who each live through their work looks like. Any friendship is based upon mutual recognition. In Braque’s work, Reverdy recognizes the demand for autonomy he makes of his own poetry. He would have his poems be Reverdy: “objects are not and can never be found anywhere else in the world than [in Reverdy’s books], inscribed there by [Reverdy] and no one else.” His commentary upon Braque is a self-affirmation as much as anything else. For both of them, it is the work alone that matters.
There’s plenty to mull over throughout Reverdy’s judiciously jargon-free assessment. In a “circa 1950” letter Reverdy wrote directly to Braque — that the translators quite usefully include with this English edition — he strikes a position that extends and supports William Carlos Williams’s well known poetical Americanism: “no ideas but in things.” (Williams, who was nearly fluent in French, was familiar with the work of Reverdy and his circle.)
I believe that poetry does not reside in anything that exists in reality. Train stations and locomotives, despite earlier claims on their behalf, are not just as poetic as cottages, forests, and brooks — they are neither more nor less poetic; they are not poetic at all. They become so through the intervention of men whose meddling makes them poetic. […] a jar, a glass, a bottle — become poetic or pictorial objects only because a poet or painter, forming them in his image, adapting them to his purpose, makes them into objects that are poetic or pictorial — terms that, for the moment, I present as equivalents. In Braque, a crock becomes poetic because it becomes a means of poetic expression — because it becomes Braque just as Braque becomes the crock.
Continuing on:
...a bottle is a bottle whether you fill it with oil, wine, or gasoline — empty or full, it remains a bottle. But when you take possession of it through your self-expression as a poet or painter, it becomes a means of poetic expression, it becomes your own self, and in this way your painting or poem is a Braque or a Reverdy. I turn my back on art; I infinitely prefer reality.
Georges Braque, Landscape Near Antwerp, 1906. Oil on canvas. Obelisk.
Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy, c. 1915. Oil on canvas.
For Reverdy, it all comes back to how the work intensifies and expands our engagement with the everyday world. Not how it makes us feel in our skin but rather how it encourages the shedding of old skin for new. Art serves to heighten our sense of both control and power over what fate holds for us. We seek to utilize the force of our creative ability to fashion a world of our own or thereby change that which is given. It amounts to a bulwark against the irrepressible reality surrounding us:
Considered in its entirety, life is an inextricable symphony about which we understand nothing — the symphony being an amalgam of diverse elements that blend and lose themselves by uniting as a whole. Thus man turned to art to satisfy his irrepressible need for harmony, and it’s only in art that he feels himself a master and god.
When Reverdy addresses the future, he emphasizes what matters is the present: “The world as it will be tomorrow. I’m far more worried by what it is and is not, by what I would so much like it to be, in our very day.” He would have readers be more aware of their immediate surroundings, locating resources to match the needs of the moment and increase our engagement with each other. That is, after all, how he found his own place in the world, as an artist among artists. He doesn’t hide how lucky his life has been:
The good fortune I had to accompany some of the greatest painters of our time through their lives — which allowed me to witness the birth of marvelous works by their hand, and to see these works assume such a high, great, luminous, and perfectly legitimate place in life. It seems almost scandalous to me to have to declare that it is not what I have to say about these works that matters, but loving them, grasping them in the simplest and most direct sense of the word, as if with one’s hand.
That sense of connection, as physical a fact as possible, propels his writing. Objects over emotions. Assertive action over idle amusement. We are well kept in the company he discovers along his way. The world out the window will never be matched, but it shall always serve as both obstacle and conveyor of the very thing against which we measure ourselves.
Page from La Liberté des Mers, a 1960 poem by Reverdy illustrated with Braque’s lithographs. KB.
