I owe Georges Braque a lot. When I was a child, a reproduction of a Braque hung opposite my place at the dining-room table. (It was the marvelous 1927 Still Life with Clarinet in the Phillips Collection, although I didn’t know that then.) I remember dawdling over meals and staring at the picture. I liked the chalky blues and murky greens and the velvety blacks; I liked the way the grey-white squares with black discs sometimes looked like the mouths of wine glasses and sometimes like playing cards, but most of all I liked the amazing, green-outlined shape that I finally decided was two pears. Art appreciation had not yet invaded New York’s elementary schools, so no one had told me about repeated shapes and compositional logic, but I could see all that. Even though nothing in the picture looked much like anything out there in the real world, it all made perfect sense, and that’s what really fascinated me.

Still Life with Clarinet wasn’t in the recent Braque retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum[1](several of its close relatives were), but the qualities the painting has exemplified for me since I was eight—lucidity, logic, invention, unexpectedness—were visible in almost every work in the show. Braque is so obviously one of the twentieth century’s great painters that it seems absurd that we have waited since 1949 for a comprehensive exhibition of his work in this country. But perhaps the delay isn’t surprising. While Braque’s reputation has never been in