BRAQUE’S STUDIO

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29746, 13 February 1962, Page 11

BRAQUE’S STUDIO

Replica At Louvre fßy a Special Correspondent at "The Times’’) When it was announced some months ago that for the first time in its history the Musee du Louvre was to welcome the work of a living artist, expectations were aroused among the more credulous spirits of a display on the scale, almost, of last year’s Poussin exhibition. For where better than in the Louvre could the masterpieces of our own day find the space, the light, and the august proximities which would allow us to situate then, in the long history of easel-painting? No living painter is so well flitted as Braque to demonstrate to us the continuity of the French genius; and English enthusiasts know from the experience of Edinburgh and London in 1956 that only th rough assemblage on the grand scale can the majesty and coherence of his achievement be appreciated to the full. All Aspects It soon became known, however, that what was in hand was, in effect, a chamber - exhibition which would touch liiehtlv upon every aspect of Braque’s work and culminate in the reconstitution within the Louvre of his studio in the Rue du Douanier. From this last feature the exhibition took the name which has been drawing large and enthusiastic crowds to the Louvre. And "L'Atelier de Braque” is—how could it fail to be?—a deeply moving experience for all who respond at all to modern art.

Admirers of Braque would, all the same, be justified in deploring both the cramped quarters allocated to this exhibition and its shortcomings as a comprehensive review of his achievement. The organisers were subject, admittedly, to a handicap which can be overcome only by preparations lengthier and, perhaps, more energetic than those customary in French official circles: the fact that a great many of Braque’s finest pictures have left France. 1920-28 Missing

It is reputedly with the artist’s approval that the fauve period has been omitted. in this instance, and the survey begun with a landscape done at L’Estaque in 1908; but there can be no argument whatever for the failure to include any picture at all from the period from 1920 to 1928.

It is not fanciful to say of the works of this period owned in the United States by Mr and Mrs Duncan Phillips, Mr and Mrs Samuel A. Marx, Mr Chester Dale, and the Museum of Modern Art that they are among the most beautiful pictures ever painted by a Frenchman: that the period should be ignored in an exhibition devised and mounted in the inmost tabernacle of French art is beyond comprehension.