Ilse’s Reviews > Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 202 of 276
Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He bombards it&each time the smoke clears,the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted,he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway.Braque,he says, merely has 'charm'; he has gone back to 'French painting', becoming the 'Vuillard of Cubism'.He tells him his pictures are 'well hung.' Braque replies that Picasso's ceramics are 'well cooked'.
— Jun 16, 2026 03:23AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 195 of 276
Colour was regarded as suspect by classical Cubism: it was 'anecdotical', it blurted, it carried too much information, it distracted from the pursuit of form. So it had to be whipped into line - literally: that old French battle between colour and line was now taking a new turn. By 1910-1911 you could have any colour you liked, so long as it was grey, brown or beige.
— Jun 12, 2026 04:12AM
Ilse
is on page 142 of 276
Bonnard is the painter of the Great Indoors, even when he is painting the Great Outdoors. One London critic,infuriated by such dense luxuriance, described the gardens glimpsed through Bonnard's windows as 'over-planted'. At last, a painter brought before the tribunal of Gardener's Question Time ('And whiles we're about it,that Douanier Rousseau's feller's bin plantin' too many of them giant succulents on his patch').
— Jun 07, 2026 10:06AM
Ilse
is on page 106 of 276
Cézanne was well read in the classics; and also proved that it is possible, if rare, to be a Balzacian, a Stendhalian and a Flaubertian all at the same time. Monet called him 'a Flaubert of painting': certainly, Cézanne had the monkishness required; also the belief that the artist behind the art should remain obscure. Though he was also - unlike Flaubert - rather prudish and proper when it came to women.(1/2)
— May 22, 2026 03:05AM
Ilse
is on page 105 of 276
Zola needed his literary success to be expressed in material terms: big house, fine food, social advancement, bourgeois respectability, whereas the better known Cézanne became, the more he avoided the world. In his later years, the painter was living in a quarry, seeing as few people as possible, and reading Flaubert. In the modern world, one of St Antony's temptations would be that of artistic success.
— May 20, 2026 02:50AM
Ilse
is on page 8 of 276
Flaubert believed it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & great paintings required no words of explanation.Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting.But we are very far from reaching that state.We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions.It is a rare picture which stuns,or argues, us into silence.
— Jan 21, 2026 08:47AM
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Jan-Maat
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Jun 19, 2026 12:49PM
I have vague but warm memories of seeing some of Braque's later and very brown paintings 😃
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Jan-Maat wrote: "I have vague but warm memories of seeing some of Braque's later and very brown paintings 😃"Glad you do :) Where did you see those later paintings (London, Lille, Paris...? Some browns can drawn you in because they are so chaleureux - it is a underrated colour :).
'Chaleureux' may be because it's the opposite of Mondriaan: in stead of separate all of 'his' primary colours in one.
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: "I have vague but warm memories of seeing some of Braque's later and very brown paintings 😃"Glad you do :) Where did you see those later paintings (London, Lille, Paris...? Some br..."
London! I think at an exhibition at the royal academy of arts
