The Seeing Machine

For noted poet John Olson, the French painter Georges Braque embodies “the seeing machine”—one of many artists who challenged the accepted views of perception and expression during the early twentieth century. Imaging Braque’s life from the First World War until his death, Olson’s lyric and charged prose delves into Braque’s mind after he endures a serious head wound in WWI, and then struggles to resume his art—to resume his alternate way of seeing. In The Seeing Machine, Olson lets the reader experience what he imagines Braque saw. Braque’s Cubistic ideas of multiple perspective, disjunction and collage leap from the page. The story is not so much Braque’s life but rather with Olson’s exploration of Braque’s deep fascination with the dynamism of sight and the stories inherent in color. Braque was a more solitary and private man (than, say, Picasso), and through his fascination with all sorts of expression, developed close relationships with such prominent French writers as Francis Ponge, Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob. War figures throughout the novel as a deterrent to artistic and spiritual consciousness, and the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s are pertinent to understanding the fascistic tendencies of our own era.