Elegance in mourning: George Braque in London

Braque is occupied with quality, and finds salvation in a delicate and exquisite economy of means. Such learned execution confers a sort of magical interest on whatever he touches.
—Walter Sickert, 1924

I like the rule that corrects the emotion.
—Georges Braque, 1917

There are times when one despairs of the London art scene. The English seem to have such a voracious appetite for everything in art except serious painting. It’s not as if nothing has changed since Henry James, writing about an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1878, took note of the vulgarity, triviality, and what he called “that singular goodiness” that characterized so many of the works to be seen there. What has changed, however, is that the Victorian taste for “that singular goodiness” has now been supplanted by a contemporary taste for the disagreeable...