Larry Witham's Blog: Novelists on Artists, page 3
March 14, 2016
Russian Jewish Painters and Poets: Marc Chagall and Yiddish Tales (no. 32)
A Modern-Day Art Theft Reveals the Secrets of an Émigré Family
WHEN YIDDISH LITERARY scholar Dara Horn heard about the 2001 theft of a small Marc Chagall painting from the Jewish Museum of New York, she had her theme for a novel. The result is The World to Come (2006), a work of fiction that combines modern art with aspects of Yiddish culture, that is, the language tradition of Eastern European and Russian Jewry.
The story opens with the theft of a Chagall painting in Manhattan, setting the contemporary stage. Just as often, though, the novel flashes back to Chagall’s early art career in the Soviet Union. The people back then will have ties to the modern-day characters, of course (this being a kind of family saga novel), but there is a third distinct layer to The World to Come as well.
This is the layer of Yiddish fairy tales, or “symbolist” stories, that Horn incorporates in the narrative, tying them to Yiddish poets associated to Chagall. The Yiddish stories, being dreamlike, often dissolve the clarity of the novel’s plot. Yet they are consistent in this: they tell of how suffering people find solace in these Yiddish fantasies—imaginary tales that are often as cheerful as Chagall’s paintings.
In the present, we meet Ben and Sara Ziskind, a brother and sister who are children of Russian émigré parents now deceased. Ben and Sara are the hub of a brainy family circle. Despite his childhood spinal problems, Ben is a prodigy with encyclopedic knowledge, “the Wizkind . . . cripple” at school. Sara, a skilled painter, also has a PhD in art history and marries Leonid, a brilliant mathematician.
One evening, Ben attends a cocktail party at the (fictional) Museum of Hebraic Art. On the wall he sees a Marc Chagall painting that used to be in his mother’s living room. His mother, Rosalie Ziskind, had been a well-known designer of children’s books, illustrating Yiddish-type stories with watercolors.
Persuaded that the painting belongs to his family, Ben steals it and takes it home to show Sarah. At the museum, Ben had met Erica Frank, a staff member and his future girlfriend. She logically concludes that he must be the thief (she finds paperwork saying the painting’s original owner had been Rosalie Ziskind, Ben’s mother).
The mystery in the plot is how Ben's mother, Rosalie, had obtained an original Chagall, now worth a million dollars, and, in turn, how it came into the possession of a Russian museum official who had loaned it to the Manhattan retrospective exhibit. Again, this takes the story back to the early days of Chagall, when he painted in Moscow in the 1920's, soon after the Russian Revolution.
As Soviet history recounts, painters and Yiddish poets were given leeway in those years before the rise of Stalin. In parts of this novel, we read of Chagall’s life as a teacher in a Soviet art collective. He also paints large murals for the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Chagall's friend is the Yiddish poet Der Nister and his art student is Boris Kulbak, to whom he gives a small painting (the one in question in the future theft).
In time, however, the Soviets crack down on both artists and Jews. Chagall emigrates to Western Europe. Before the deadly purge begins, Boris the artist gives the Chagall painting to his daughter. And Der Nister conceals his handwritten Yiddish stories in the lining of the Chagall murals. The artwork and writings disappear into the dark political chaos—until Ben and Sara begin to figure things out in New York.
Their mother, Rosalie, had indeed owned the Chagall painting. As we learn, she is actually the daughter of Boris, originally named Raisya. Her name was changed to “Rosalie” on her arrival in New Jersey as a Russian émigré. Years later, when Rosalie’s husband died, she needed money to keep the house and send the children to college. So she sent the Chagall painting to a post-Soviet Russian art dealer for an appraisal.
The Russian dealer is corrupt, and even worse. On receiving the painting, he wrote back to Rosalie that it was a fake (fairly common with Chagall’s) and must be destroyed. Horror of horrors, he is also the very Soviet lackey who had sent Boris (Rosalie's father) to the gulag, and now is lending the painting to the Manhattan Chagall exhibition. Given these horrendous facts, Ben’s theft is justified. Erica Frank, the museum staffer, now takes his side. Sara, a skilled painter, forges a replica of the on-loan Chagall and Erica re-installs it at the museum (as if it never left).
More than this, however, Erica has begun to probe a collection of old Chagall murals in the dark, cavernous basement of the museum. There she finds the handwritten stories of the Yiddish poet Der Nister stuffed in the murals. A new realization comes: Rosalie Ziskind, who had accepted professional praise as the "author" of the Yiddish children’s books, had simply copied the lost Der Nister stories. “Your mother, whose work I very much admired, is a plagiarist and a fraud,” Erica blurts out, at least at first.
The family, and Erica, again confront the puzzle of art and forgery. They realize that if Rosalie had not reconstituted Der Nister’s work as her own, the old Yiddish stories would have been lost forever, a loss to the Russian Jewish heritage. (Rosalie had tried to get them published, in fact, but there was no market for the arcane literature. Under her name, they became popular).
Besides containing the dreaminess of the Yiddish fairy tales, and despite the obvious talents of Ben and Sara, The World to Come is a novel about the constant threat to Jewish survival, both physically and culturally. Early on, Ben despairs over the end of his family line: “Don’t you get it? Our family is finished, Sara,” and therefore he stole the painting as the only thing they had left. What is more, the novel frequently cites a Yiddish tale, “All-Bridge,” an imaginary span that “leads from the deepest depths of the abyss to the highest heights of heaven.”
Perhaps fittingly, if darkly, the narrative ends with Erica in the basement hoping to revive the Chagall and Yiddish heritages. At that very moment, however, a terrorist bomb destroys the museum. Ben rushes down into the smoldering dark, but it’s too late.
The novel closes with yet another Yiddish story, much like a Chagall paintings. Happy Jewish people are crossing bridges in the sky, floating above ghetto buildings, and ultimately finding a better world to come.
WHEN YIDDISH LITERARY scholar Dara Horn heard about the 2001 theft of a small Marc Chagall painting from the Jewish Museum of New York, she had her theme for a novel. The result is The World to Come (2006), a work of fiction that combines modern art with aspects of Yiddish culture, that is, the language tradition of Eastern European and Russian Jewry.
The story opens with the theft of a Chagall painting in Manhattan, setting the contemporary stage. Just as often, though, the novel flashes back to Chagall’s early art career in the Soviet Union. The people back then will have ties to the modern-day characters, of course (this being a kind of family saga novel), but there is a third distinct layer to The World to Come as well.
This is the layer of Yiddish fairy tales, or “symbolist” stories, that Horn incorporates in the narrative, tying them to Yiddish poets associated to Chagall. The Yiddish stories, being dreamlike, often dissolve the clarity of the novel’s plot. Yet they are consistent in this: they tell of how suffering people find solace in these Yiddish fantasies—imaginary tales that are often as cheerful as Chagall’s paintings.
In the present, we meet Ben and Sara Ziskind, a brother and sister who are children of Russian émigré parents now deceased. Ben and Sara are the hub of a brainy family circle. Despite his childhood spinal problems, Ben is a prodigy with encyclopedic knowledge, “the Wizkind . . . cripple” at school. Sara, a skilled painter, also has a PhD in art history and marries Leonid, a brilliant mathematician.
One evening, Ben attends a cocktail party at the (fictional) Museum of Hebraic Art. On the wall he sees a Marc Chagall painting that used to be in his mother’s living room. His mother, Rosalie Ziskind, had been a well-known designer of children’s books, illustrating Yiddish-type stories with watercolors.
Persuaded that the painting belongs to his family, Ben steals it and takes it home to show Sarah. At the museum, Ben had met Erica Frank, a staff member and his future girlfriend. She logically concludes that he must be the thief (she finds paperwork saying the painting’s original owner had been Rosalie Ziskind, Ben’s mother).
The mystery in the plot is how Ben's mother, Rosalie, had obtained an original Chagall, now worth a million dollars, and, in turn, how it came into the possession of a Russian museum official who had loaned it to the Manhattan retrospective exhibit. Again, this takes the story back to the early days of Chagall, when he painted in Moscow in the 1920's, soon after the Russian Revolution.
As Soviet history recounts, painters and Yiddish poets were given leeway in those years before the rise of Stalin. In parts of this novel, we read of Chagall’s life as a teacher in a Soviet art collective. He also paints large murals for the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Chagall's friend is the Yiddish poet Der Nister and his art student is Boris Kulbak, to whom he gives a small painting (the one in question in the future theft).
In time, however, the Soviets crack down on both artists and Jews. Chagall emigrates to Western Europe. Before the deadly purge begins, Boris the artist gives the Chagall painting to his daughter. And Der Nister conceals his handwritten Yiddish stories in the lining of the Chagall murals. The artwork and writings disappear into the dark political chaos—until Ben and Sara begin to figure things out in New York.
Their mother, Rosalie, had indeed owned the Chagall painting. As we learn, she is actually the daughter of Boris, originally named Raisya. Her name was changed to “Rosalie” on her arrival in New Jersey as a Russian émigré. Years later, when Rosalie’s husband died, she needed money to keep the house and send the children to college. So she sent the Chagall painting to a post-Soviet Russian art dealer for an appraisal.
The Russian dealer is corrupt, and even worse. On receiving the painting, he wrote back to Rosalie that it was a fake (fairly common with Chagall’s) and must be destroyed. Horror of horrors, he is also the very Soviet lackey who had sent Boris (Rosalie's father) to the gulag, and now is lending the painting to the Manhattan Chagall exhibition. Given these horrendous facts, Ben’s theft is justified. Erica Frank, the museum staffer, now takes his side. Sara, a skilled painter, forges a replica of the on-loan Chagall and Erica re-installs it at the museum (as if it never left).
More than this, however, Erica has begun to probe a collection of old Chagall murals in the dark, cavernous basement of the museum. There she finds the handwritten stories of the Yiddish poet Der Nister stuffed in the murals. A new realization comes: Rosalie Ziskind, who had accepted professional praise as the "author" of the Yiddish children’s books, had simply copied the lost Der Nister stories. “Your mother, whose work I very much admired, is a plagiarist and a fraud,” Erica blurts out, at least at first.
The family, and Erica, again confront the puzzle of art and forgery. They realize that if Rosalie had not reconstituted Der Nister’s work as her own, the old Yiddish stories would have been lost forever, a loss to the Russian Jewish heritage. (Rosalie had tried to get them published, in fact, but there was no market for the arcane literature. Under her name, they became popular).
Besides containing the dreaminess of the Yiddish fairy tales, and despite the obvious talents of Ben and Sara, The World to Come is a novel about the constant threat to Jewish survival, both physically and culturally. Early on, Ben despairs over the end of his family line: “Don’t you get it? Our family is finished, Sara,” and therefore he stole the painting as the only thing they had left. What is more, the novel frequently cites a Yiddish tale, “All-Bridge,” an imaginary span that “leads from the deepest depths of the abyss to the highest heights of heaven.”
Perhaps fittingly, if darkly, the narrative ends with Erica in the basement hoping to revive the Chagall and Yiddish heritages. At that very moment, however, a terrorist bomb destroys the museum. Ben rushes down into the smoldering dark, but it’s too late.
The novel closes with yet another Yiddish story, much like a Chagall paintings. Happy Jewish people are crossing bridges in the sky, floating above ghetto buildings, and ultimately finding a better world to come.
March 10, 2016
Peter Bruegel and His Paintings Come Alive in Fiction (no. 31)
Sci-fi Author Rucker takes us to the Strange World of Netherlandish Art
WHEN HE TURNED his attention to European art history, the prolific sci-fi author Rudy Rucker did not chose Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516), whose weird and bizarre imagery surely qualifies as early science fiction. Instead, Rucker turned to Bosch’s successor, Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), who continued in the strange illustrative manner of his predecessor.
Both were pioneers of a distinct Netherlandish art, part academic, part cartoon and documentary. Both Bosch and Bruegel found fame in their lifetimes and were patronized by the new merchant dealers and the aristocracy.
However, these were touchy political times in the Netherlands. Bruegel, for instance, practiced on the eve of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. His illustrative paintings, with their incredible detail, could well be taken as commentary on such political issues, since the artworks were frequently moral tales about sin and virtue and the vanities and absurdities of man. Bruegel apparently walked a fine line between being accused of political “lampoons” and claiming that his art simply was decorative or expressive of fairy tales.
In the novel As Above, So Below (2002), Rucker takes good advantage of this political tension to cast a story that is historically accurate, yet adds in a fictional drama about Bruegel’s conflict with the occupying powers, the Spanish Hapsburgs.
The treatment of Bruegel as historical fiction is rare, but not unknown (as Rucker nobly shares in his acknowledgments). What’s new in Rucker’s treatment is how he organizes the biographical chronology based on sixteen artworks by Bruegel. Rucker’s story telling also emulates the earthy—almost scatological—grittiness of Bruegel’s own paintings. The artworks never stop short of illustrating every nasty aspect of human life: death, illness, ugliness, lust, and calumny.
We meet the young Bruegel on his first trip to Rome, where he sees the great Renaissance art of the city. In Rucker’s fictional gloss, Bruegel draws a first miniature of the Tower of Babel based on the Roman Coliseum (a real and astonishing painting that Bruegel rendered twice later in his career).
Next, in his hometown of Antwerp, Bruegel moves from apprentice to guild member. He becomes a leading draftsmen for publishers, and eventually corrals wealthy patrons.
Now he moves to Brussels, and there we follow Bruegel’s family and love life, his new reputation as a serious painter, and his establishment of a studio. Rucker, a careful scientist (indeed a mathematician and computer pro) explains in precise detail the new technologies of painting, of which Bruegel takes advantage.
The drama, however, is political. The Spaniards have occupied the towns, and along with that they claim the right to live in local residences. Two Spaniards—with “Carlos the monkey” the chief villain—take over Bruegel’s house. When drunk, Carlos plays in Bruegel’s studio, ruining is paintings. These are Bruegel’s livelihood, which Carlos is seriously threatening.
Bruegel is desperate: “He had to drive the soldiers from his studio.” The plan is to have the seductive Niay, a laundress in the local brothel, ply the Spaniards with nutmeg and gin. Then Bruegel would simulate a ghost to scare them away (this was the age of witches, recall). However, Bruegel-as-ghost-with-sword only provokes the drunk Carlos, who raises his saber and attacks. To stop him, the painter’s ally strangles Carlos to death (the other solider is indeed spooked, and ran off).
“A fitting revenge for daubing on Master Bruegel’s picture, eh?” a friend says. They put the body in a painting crate and spirit it out of the town. “Good,” Bruegel says. “Do it right away.”
And speaking of drama, all the while Bruegel’s wife is bearing their first child, a son, downstairs as the end of Carlos is taking place upstairs.
Fortunately, the next Spaniard to occupy the house, Corporal Miguel accepts the story that the two soldiers went AWOL. Miguel is more spy than soldier and Bruegel is able to persuade him that his paintings are mere “fairy tales,” not political commentary. And so Bruegel’s career continues unhindered, with a few more great paintings in the offing (such as The Blind Leading the Blind) before he dies relatively young, not yet knowing that his son would take up the baton. After Peter the Elder expires, the book ends on this line: “After a bit, Little Peter walked across the room and picked up his father’s brush.”
Rucker builds on the known Bruegel biography, putting in the main historical figures. In Bruegel’s intimate circles, he seems to add some progressive commentary, for example making Bruegel’s close colleague, the wise and brilliant cartographer Abraham Ortelius, a gay man, and his loyal friend, Williblad Cheroo, a Native American.
We also meet Bruegel’s two main patrons, true to history. The first is the wealthy Antwerp merchant Nicholaas Jonghelinck, who commissioned the six-season series. The second is Cardinal Granvelle; he frequently queries Bruegel on whether or not his paintings are trying to insult Catholic dignitaries and policies. For example, Bruegel has rendered the New Testament story of the Massacre of the Innocents as taking place in a Flemish town, suggesting symbolically the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition.
Granvelle remains fond of Bruegel. When the cardinal is promoted in rank to Naples, he still requests new paintings. In sum, Bruegel moved in fairly high social circles. In the novel, Rucker has him meeting even the Hapsburg royalty, the Hapsburg king himself and the regent Margaret, who in effect was the local ruler for the dynasty. Bruegel plays his cards close to his chest, walking a fine line between offending neither the Catholic rulers nor the “Calvinist fanatics.” Helpfully, one of his fans is the Archduke of Austria, who takes over most of the in-debt Jonghelinck’s stock of Bruegel paintings.
To add earthiness, the novel offers up some colorful fictions. The libidinous young Bruegel fornicates with his art teacher’s wife, and then marries his art teacher’s daughter. All of society is a bit off, with witch burnings, heretics on gallows, sexual promiscuity, vomit, boils, foul smells, dreadful faces, and death at everyone’s door—much like Bruegel’s more horrendous paintings. A nice break from computer science for author Rucker, we can imagine.
In the midst of all this, Bruegel completes his famous series of six paintings of the four seasons, for which he is paid grandly, and during which he finds the greatest moment of happiness in his life. Today, about forty of Bruegel’s paintings still survive, and if not quite up to modern science fiction, they are surely among the weirdest renderings of that bygone era, Hieronymous Bosch notwithstanding. As Bruegel says in the novel, he is not a follower of Bosch, but rather “the new Bosch.”
WHEN HE TURNED his attention to European art history, the prolific sci-fi author Rudy Rucker did not chose Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516), whose weird and bizarre imagery surely qualifies as early science fiction. Instead, Rucker turned to Bosch’s successor, Peter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), who continued in the strange illustrative manner of his predecessor.
Both were pioneers of a distinct Netherlandish art, part academic, part cartoon and documentary. Both Bosch and Bruegel found fame in their lifetimes and were patronized by the new merchant dealers and the aristocracy.
However, these were touchy political times in the Netherlands. Bruegel, for instance, practiced on the eve of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. His illustrative paintings, with their incredible detail, could well be taken as commentary on such political issues, since the artworks were frequently moral tales about sin and virtue and the vanities and absurdities of man. Bruegel apparently walked a fine line between being accused of political “lampoons” and claiming that his art simply was decorative or expressive of fairy tales.
In the novel As Above, So Below (2002), Rucker takes good advantage of this political tension to cast a story that is historically accurate, yet adds in a fictional drama about Bruegel’s conflict with the occupying powers, the Spanish Hapsburgs.
The treatment of Bruegel as historical fiction is rare, but not unknown (as Rucker nobly shares in his acknowledgments). What’s new in Rucker’s treatment is how he organizes the biographical chronology based on sixteen artworks by Bruegel. Rucker’s story telling also emulates the earthy—almost scatological—grittiness of Bruegel’s own paintings. The artworks never stop short of illustrating every nasty aspect of human life: death, illness, ugliness, lust, and calumny.
We meet the young Bruegel on his first trip to Rome, where he sees the great Renaissance art of the city. In Rucker’s fictional gloss, Bruegel draws a first miniature of the Tower of Babel based on the Roman Coliseum (a real and astonishing painting that Bruegel rendered twice later in his career).
Next, in his hometown of Antwerp, Bruegel moves from apprentice to guild member. He becomes a leading draftsmen for publishers, and eventually corrals wealthy patrons.
Now he moves to Brussels, and there we follow Bruegel’s family and love life, his new reputation as a serious painter, and his establishment of a studio. Rucker, a careful scientist (indeed a mathematician and computer pro) explains in precise detail the new technologies of painting, of which Bruegel takes advantage.
The drama, however, is political. The Spaniards have occupied the towns, and along with that they claim the right to live in local residences. Two Spaniards—with “Carlos the monkey” the chief villain—take over Bruegel’s house. When drunk, Carlos plays in Bruegel’s studio, ruining is paintings. These are Bruegel’s livelihood, which Carlos is seriously threatening.
Bruegel is desperate: “He had to drive the soldiers from his studio.” The plan is to have the seductive Niay, a laundress in the local brothel, ply the Spaniards with nutmeg and gin. Then Bruegel would simulate a ghost to scare them away (this was the age of witches, recall). However, Bruegel-as-ghost-with-sword only provokes the drunk Carlos, who raises his saber and attacks. To stop him, the painter’s ally strangles Carlos to death (the other solider is indeed spooked, and ran off).
“A fitting revenge for daubing on Master Bruegel’s picture, eh?” a friend says. They put the body in a painting crate and spirit it out of the town. “Good,” Bruegel says. “Do it right away.”
And speaking of drama, all the while Bruegel’s wife is bearing their first child, a son, downstairs as the end of Carlos is taking place upstairs.
Fortunately, the next Spaniard to occupy the house, Corporal Miguel accepts the story that the two soldiers went AWOL. Miguel is more spy than soldier and Bruegel is able to persuade him that his paintings are mere “fairy tales,” not political commentary. And so Bruegel’s career continues unhindered, with a few more great paintings in the offing (such as The Blind Leading the Blind) before he dies relatively young, not yet knowing that his son would take up the baton. After Peter the Elder expires, the book ends on this line: “After a bit, Little Peter walked across the room and picked up his father’s brush.”
Rucker builds on the known Bruegel biography, putting in the main historical figures. In Bruegel’s intimate circles, he seems to add some progressive commentary, for example making Bruegel’s close colleague, the wise and brilliant cartographer Abraham Ortelius, a gay man, and his loyal friend, Williblad Cheroo, a Native American.
We also meet Bruegel’s two main patrons, true to history. The first is the wealthy Antwerp merchant Nicholaas Jonghelinck, who commissioned the six-season series. The second is Cardinal Granvelle; he frequently queries Bruegel on whether or not his paintings are trying to insult Catholic dignitaries and policies. For example, Bruegel has rendered the New Testament story of the Massacre of the Innocents as taking place in a Flemish town, suggesting symbolically the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition.
Granvelle remains fond of Bruegel. When the cardinal is promoted in rank to Naples, he still requests new paintings. In sum, Bruegel moved in fairly high social circles. In the novel, Rucker has him meeting even the Hapsburg royalty, the Hapsburg king himself and the regent Margaret, who in effect was the local ruler for the dynasty. Bruegel plays his cards close to his chest, walking a fine line between offending neither the Catholic rulers nor the “Calvinist fanatics.” Helpfully, one of his fans is the Archduke of Austria, who takes over most of the in-debt Jonghelinck’s stock of Bruegel paintings.
To add earthiness, the novel offers up some colorful fictions. The libidinous young Bruegel fornicates with his art teacher’s wife, and then marries his art teacher’s daughter. All of society is a bit off, with witch burnings, heretics on gallows, sexual promiscuity, vomit, boils, foul smells, dreadful faces, and death at everyone’s door—much like Bruegel’s more horrendous paintings. A nice break from computer science for author Rucker, we can imagine.
In the midst of all this, Bruegel completes his famous series of six paintings of the four seasons, for which he is paid grandly, and during which he finds the greatest moment of happiness in his life. Today, about forty of Bruegel’s paintings still survive, and if not quite up to modern science fiction, they are surely among the weirdest renderings of that bygone era, Hieronymous Bosch notwithstanding. As Bruegel says in the novel, he is not a follower of Bosch, but rather “the new Bosch.”
March 7, 2016
Degas and Cassatt a Romantic Twosome in Art History Fiction (no. 30)
Five Novels Wrap Their Plots around Women Drawn to Degas
A ROMANCE BETWEEN two famous painters is not easy to find in art history. That’s why novels on the subject have turned to Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt. While their relationship is actually uncertain, their acquaintance is well-documented.
They met in Paris during the Belle Époque (the 1870s onward). She was the American woman breaking into the new Impressionist art circles, he the French virtuoso around whom many Impressionist pioneers revolved. Of the two painters, Degas has been the primary topic of romance novels. When Cassatt is not the fictional love interest, other women—patrons or ballerinas—fill that role in the novelist’s mind.
The supposed Cassatt-Degas romance is at the heart of two recent works of fiction. Added to that, three more novels put Degas in romantic entanglements with other women.
■ The fullest novel on a Cassatt-Degas dalliance is Robin Oliveira’s I Always Loved You (2014). It opens with the elderly Mary, eyes fading, thinking back to what might have been.
She first meets Degas at the Paris Salon, the annual art exhibit. He takes interest in her work, visits her studio, and encourages her painting style. A third of the novel is dedicated to the year 1877, when there is much ferment among the Impressionists, and in this we enter the Impressionist world.
Eventually, Cassatt gives Degas her virginity but is never quite sure where it goes from there. As Mary says, “The point is, Edgar, that we don’t know what to do with one another. And I can’t trust you.” He has said they could marry, but that will lead to inconveniences and “boredom.” The most he ever offers is, “I didn’t say I didn’t love you.”
Mary’s career also comes first, especially after her major Paris exhibit. She avoids being “irretrievably entangled” with Degas and later hates him for his anti-Semitism. They are destined to go their own ways because of art, and because of their strong personalities. But in the end she grieves their parting, realizing that “pain was the foundation of art.”
The novel, in fact, is a story of lost love for a few characters. Part of entering this intimate world of the Impressionists is to meet Degas’s friend, Edouard Manet, who is in an awkward marriage, a true story all its own. The male painters are a promiscuous lot (also true history). Manet contracts syphilis and, meanwhile, actually is in love with his brother’s wife, the painter Berthe Morisot.
The story closes with Mary, having become famous, outliving all the other Impressionists, who are dying off in the 1890s. Before she goes, she burns Degas’s letters, thankful at least that he taught her to “paint love.”
■ The Degas-Cassatt relationship takes on an entirely different vantage in Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (2001). Lydia is Mary’s older sister by seven years. As Lydia struggles nobly in the Cassatt family home in Paris with a kidney disease, Mary paints her as a model, producing five now-famous works of art.
Chessman plots the story on these five painter-model episodes. The story follows Lydia’s thoughts as she watches her sister rise as a painter. Lydia is also a witness to Mary’s apparent romance with Degas. In her own heart, Lydia imagines her own love affair with Degas. When he looks upon Lydia, she feels beautiful, even important. The same uplift happens as she's surrounded by the five paintings. Some of them became famous at the time—prompting Lydia to protest when these family memories will be sold at the Salon.
Lydia’s illness grows worse. She dies in 1882, and this at the peak of Mary’s success. The story mixes the beauty of art with the laments of life. In her humble crochet, Lydia, too, aspires to create beauty. Still, she cannot avoid comparing herself to Mary, pondering what her own life might have been, struggling to appreciate—in the face of death—what she nevertheless has seen and lived.
In the next two novels, Degas is seen from the viewpoint of young women in the world of the Paris ballet, which Degas visited, sketched, and painted.
■ Dancing for Degas: A Novel (Kathryn Wagner, 2010). Here, the twelve-year-old ballet student Alexandrie, a poor girl risen to success at the Opera Ballet, is a character who inspires many of Degas’s pastels and paintings. In this fictional treatment, the ballet world is a dark place. Parents are greedy and the venue is a swamp of sexual politics. Older ballerinas compete with newcomers. Wealthy men gain access to ballerinas as whores. Alexandrie is attracted to Degas, but he is just as manipulative as the rest. Still, she learns how to survive. The 1870 Franco-Prussian War intervenes. Cézanne and Monet make appearances. The novel features several of Degas’s ballet compositions, reading into them some of his intrigues with the girls. After thirteen years of this, Alexandrie meets an American who will take her away.
■ The Painted Girls (2013) by Cathy Marie Buchanan. This story focuses on Degas’s innovative wax sculpture of a ballerina. Done in a two-thirds scale, it bears a wig of human hair, ballerina bodice, tutu, slippers. Buchanan dramatizes the true facts (which she first saw in a documentary); three indigent Belgian sisters arrive in Paris to survive. One of them, the fourteen-year-old Marie Goethem, works at the Paris Opéra. She gains the attention of Degas. Soon we find her in Degas’s studio, naked and vulnerable, posing for the wax sculpture. Again, here is a story of young women on the brink of prostitution to escape from poverty. In the novel, Marie avoids the snares, despite the coming-on of one wealthy patron. She and her sister support each other. The wax sculpture is also an art historical story: Degas is reaching fame, and its display in 1881 brings an outcry from the critics (only now, in fiction, were are given the story of the model, not just the artwork).
■ While the aforementioned novels are historical, The Art Forger (2012) by B.A. Shapiro glances back at Degas from contemporary Boston. The heroine is a young Boston painter seeking her success in the competitive art market. She makes “copies” of famous works (a copy only being a “forgery” if you attach an illicit signature and try to sell it as authentic).
She is hired to make an “innocent” copy of a Degas painting, and that’s where the excitement begins. In Boston, of course, the theft of paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains a great mystery. In the real event, some Degas drawings were stolen. Novelist Shapiro adds a fictional Degas painting to the cache (indeed, the one being copied). It’s titled After the Bath and is Degas’s painting of Isabella Gardner (naked), founder of the museum.
In addition to the painting, the novel uses fictional love letters between Degas and Gardner to produce their hypothetical romance. The letters, and the sexual politics of the Gardner-Degas tryst, become clues that lead our heroine to find the stolen Degas painting.
It’s no accident that all five novels are written by women for, presumable, a female readership. Romance novels rank top in sales in all fiction. However, the image of male lovers in these Degas novels do not fare well, generally. The feminist edge can be sharp. In the The Art Forger, not only do we have the lusty Isabella Gardner (and the contemporary heroine having aesthetic “orgasms”), the story’s villains are two predatory men who try to thwart our heroine’s art career (though, alternatively, there is a good guy who is gay).
A ROMANCE BETWEEN two famous painters is not easy to find in art history. That’s why novels on the subject have turned to Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt. While their relationship is actually uncertain, their acquaintance is well-documented.
They met in Paris during the Belle Époque (the 1870s onward). She was the American woman breaking into the new Impressionist art circles, he the French virtuoso around whom many Impressionist pioneers revolved. Of the two painters, Degas has been the primary topic of romance novels. When Cassatt is not the fictional love interest, other women—patrons or ballerinas—fill that role in the novelist’s mind.
The supposed Cassatt-Degas romance is at the heart of two recent works of fiction. Added to that, three more novels put Degas in romantic entanglements with other women.
■ The fullest novel on a Cassatt-Degas dalliance is Robin Oliveira’s I Always Loved You (2014). It opens with the elderly Mary, eyes fading, thinking back to what might have been.
She first meets Degas at the Paris Salon, the annual art exhibit. He takes interest in her work, visits her studio, and encourages her painting style. A third of the novel is dedicated to the year 1877, when there is much ferment among the Impressionists, and in this we enter the Impressionist world.
Eventually, Cassatt gives Degas her virginity but is never quite sure where it goes from there. As Mary says, “The point is, Edgar, that we don’t know what to do with one another. And I can’t trust you.” He has said they could marry, but that will lead to inconveniences and “boredom.” The most he ever offers is, “I didn’t say I didn’t love you.”
Mary’s career also comes first, especially after her major Paris exhibit. She avoids being “irretrievably entangled” with Degas and later hates him for his anti-Semitism. They are destined to go their own ways because of art, and because of their strong personalities. But in the end she grieves their parting, realizing that “pain was the foundation of art.”
The novel, in fact, is a story of lost love for a few characters. Part of entering this intimate world of the Impressionists is to meet Degas’s friend, Edouard Manet, who is in an awkward marriage, a true story all its own. The male painters are a promiscuous lot (also true history). Manet contracts syphilis and, meanwhile, actually is in love with his brother’s wife, the painter Berthe Morisot.
The story closes with Mary, having become famous, outliving all the other Impressionists, who are dying off in the 1890s. Before she goes, she burns Degas’s letters, thankful at least that he taught her to “paint love.”
■ The Degas-Cassatt relationship takes on an entirely different vantage in Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper (2001). Lydia is Mary’s older sister by seven years. As Lydia struggles nobly in the Cassatt family home in Paris with a kidney disease, Mary paints her as a model, producing five now-famous works of art.
Chessman plots the story on these five painter-model episodes. The story follows Lydia’s thoughts as she watches her sister rise as a painter. Lydia is also a witness to Mary’s apparent romance with Degas. In her own heart, Lydia imagines her own love affair with Degas. When he looks upon Lydia, she feels beautiful, even important. The same uplift happens as she's surrounded by the five paintings. Some of them became famous at the time—prompting Lydia to protest when these family memories will be sold at the Salon.
Lydia’s illness grows worse. She dies in 1882, and this at the peak of Mary’s success. The story mixes the beauty of art with the laments of life. In her humble crochet, Lydia, too, aspires to create beauty. Still, she cannot avoid comparing herself to Mary, pondering what her own life might have been, struggling to appreciate—in the face of death—what she nevertheless has seen and lived.
In the next two novels, Degas is seen from the viewpoint of young women in the world of the Paris ballet, which Degas visited, sketched, and painted.
■ Dancing for Degas: A Novel (Kathryn Wagner, 2010). Here, the twelve-year-old ballet student Alexandrie, a poor girl risen to success at the Opera Ballet, is a character who inspires many of Degas’s pastels and paintings. In this fictional treatment, the ballet world is a dark place. Parents are greedy and the venue is a swamp of sexual politics. Older ballerinas compete with newcomers. Wealthy men gain access to ballerinas as whores. Alexandrie is attracted to Degas, but he is just as manipulative as the rest. Still, she learns how to survive. The 1870 Franco-Prussian War intervenes. Cézanne and Monet make appearances. The novel features several of Degas’s ballet compositions, reading into them some of his intrigues with the girls. After thirteen years of this, Alexandrie meets an American who will take her away.
■ The Painted Girls (2013) by Cathy Marie Buchanan. This story focuses on Degas’s innovative wax sculpture of a ballerina. Done in a two-thirds scale, it bears a wig of human hair, ballerina bodice, tutu, slippers. Buchanan dramatizes the true facts (which she first saw in a documentary); three indigent Belgian sisters arrive in Paris to survive. One of them, the fourteen-year-old Marie Goethem, works at the Paris Opéra. She gains the attention of Degas. Soon we find her in Degas’s studio, naked and vulnerable, posing for the wax sculpture. Again, here is a story of young women on the brink of prostitution to escape from poverty. In the novel, Marie avoids the snares, despite the coming-on of one wealthy patron. She and her sister support each other. The wax sculpture is also an art historical story: Degas is reaching fame, and its display in 1881 brings an outcry from the critics (only now, in fiction, were are given the story of the model, not just the artwork).
■ While the aforementioned novels are historical, The Art Forger (2012) by B.A. Shapiro glances back at Degas from contemporary Boston. The heroine is a young Boston painter seeking her success in the competitive art market. She makes “copies” of famous works (a copy only being a “forgery” if you attach an illicit signature and try to sell it as authentic).
She is hired to make an “innocent” copy of a Degas painting, and that’s where the excitement begins. In Boston, of course, the theft of paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains a great mystery. In the real event, some Degas drawings were stolen. Novelist Shapiro adds a fictional Degas painting to the cache (indeed, the one being copied). It’s titled After the Bath and is Degas’s painting of Isabella Gardner (naked), founder of the museum.
In addition to the painting, the novel uses fictional love letters between Degas and Gardner to produce their hypothetical romance. The letters, and the sexual politics of the Gardner-Degas tryst, become clues that lead our heroine to find the stolen Degas painting.
It’s no accident that all five novels are written by women for, presumable, a female readership. Romance novels rank top in sales in all fiction. However, the image of male lovers in these Degas novels do not fare well, generally. The feminist edge can be sharp. In the The Art Forger, not only do we have the lusty Isabella Gardner (and the contemporary heroine having aesthetic “orgasms”), the story’s villains are two predatory men who try to thwart our heroine’s art career (though, alternatively, there is a good guy who is gay).
March 3, 2016
A Detective Pursues Artworks in the Dark World of the Sarajevo Siege (no. 29)
A War Correspondent’s Art Noir Story in Eastern Europe
THE ART HISTORIAN Lynn H. Nichols is not a novelist. Since 1994, however, quite a few novelists have been in her debt.
Nichols wrote The Rape of Europa. It is the single best book on the Nazi looting of European art. And among her grateful following is novelist Dan Fesperman, who takes us into the Balkans and incorporates the WWII art-looting legacy into his unique detective novel, Lie in the Dark (1999). It may be the single best novel on the 1990s civil war in Bosnia (at least to this blog), thanks to its art world elements.
As a war correspondent in Bosnia, Fesperman gained real-life observations of the military, political, and cultural clashes of that time. He has used that knowledge to create an evocative backdrop for what begins as a murder investigation.
The story takes place in Sarajevo amid a four-year siege of the city (1992-96), a bitter part of the armed strife between ethnic Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims after the breakup of Yugoslavia. During the siege, the Serbs are seeking to capture Sarajevo, a Bosnian government enclave.
Siege or not, life and crime go on. One night the local police chief, Esmir Vitas, is shot and killed by the river. Vitas is an honest cop dedicated to cracking down on gangsters who control various neighborhoods. Still, the Interior Ministry suspiciously concludes that Vitas was struck by an errant sniper bullet. It sends Inspector Vlado Petric—our hero and one of two city homicide detectives—to wrap up the case and file it away.
At the morgue, however, Petric obtains a scrap of paper from the victim’s pants pocket with a name and address. When he goes to this address, the real story, told by a former Yugoslav museum official named Milan Glavis, begins to unfold.
The story is this: At the end of WWII, representatives from countries invaded by the Nazis went to “collecting points” in Allied- and Soviet-occupied Germany to reclaim stolen art. The two men in charge of Sarajevo’s National Museum made this reclamation trip with a criminal plan in mind: to claim paintings that are not really theirs.
Using blank slips, they forged bogus art claims on hundreds of works, spiriting them back to Sarajevo, a kind of looting in reverse. The museum was too small, so they farmed out the paintings, mainly to offices and homes of the new Communist Party elite. To keep track of these transfers of art, they produced a “transfer file” with a card and notations for each artwork.
“We knew all along where everything was,” the former museum director tells Inspector Petric.
Now, in the chaos of the Sarajevo siege, a district warlord, Commander Zarko, has used his control of a city sector to round up the “transferred” art to sell it on the black market. Once Zarko is killed, however, a small group of high-ranking Interior Ministry “special police” and a few military men decided to take over the art smuggling ring. They send the art to Frankfurt for illicit sales in the West.
To pull this off, the corrupt officials have engaged in a lot of “sweet-talking UNESCO underlings and blue-helmeted shipping officers” who oversee the UN-controlled airport—the only way to ship materials out of Sarajevo.
Gradually, Inspector Petric realizes that his government superiors had probably killed Vitas to protect the smuggling operation. To investigate further could mean his own death, and yet Petric continues to dig deeper into the maze of corruption. His investigation takes him across dangerous check points and into some of the worst zones of the city. More than once, he takes a car or taxi down “Sniper Alley,” with fingers crossed.
For example, he heads for the notorious neighborhood of Dobrinja: “If Sarajevo had become a sort of hell on earth, Dobrinja was it innermost circle of despair and isolation.” The driver must avoid “shell holes and torn metal without slowing down enough to invite gunfire.” Serbian snipers are on three sides.
When the museum director-informant also shows up dead at the morgue, Petric realizes he can no longer trust his police superiors (or even his partner, who tries to kill him in the end). So he hooks up with British war correspondent Toby Perkins. Toby’s got an armored Land Rover and UN press pass to get through check points. “An art smuggle operation,” Toby realizes. “And with some very big fish involved.”
Petric also has a female ally, Amira, a “farm wife” who came to the city to survive as a prostitute outside the military barracks. She was a witness to the Vitas shooting. She ends up offering a safe house for Petric and Toby (and a place to hide paintings and the transfer file).
In this novel, artworks are not described, except for focusing on an “impressionist masterpiece” of a “field of lilies” hung in the apartment of Petric’s informant. In the last pages, this is the painting that Petric finds on its way to Frankfurt, where he hopes to use it as proof of the art crimes swirling about Sarajevo.
Readers of detective noir will find Lie in the Dark to be a familiar friend. It evokes the dark atmosphere of works such as Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Graham Greene’s The Third Man.
In the last chapter, we find Petric inside a crate with one of the paintings being shipped to Germany (indeed, the very same impressionist lilies). The crate is almost opened by guards, but since a corrupt police official knows the crate contains his latest stolen cache, he tells the guards to pass over it. This is the novel’s last satisfying twist. The plane, with Petric, is off to Germany.
The story began with Inspector Petric seeing gravediggers on a snowy hill, and in flight, he looks out a crack in the crate and sees the same snowy hill, soon to have its gravediggers at work again.
THE ART HISTORIAN Lynn H. Nichols is not a novelist. Since 1994, however, quite a few novelists have been in her debt.
Nichols wrote The Rape of Europa. It is the single best book on the Nazi looting of European art. And among her grateful following is novelist Dan Fesperman, who takes us into the Balkans and incorporates the WWII art-looting legacy into his unique detective novel, Lie in the Dark (1999). It may be the single best novel on the 1990s civil war in Bosnia (at least to this blog), thanks to its art world elements.
As a war correspondent in Bosnia, Fesperman gained real-life observations of the military, political, and cultural clashes of that time. He has used that knowledge to create an evocative backdrop for what begins as a murder investigation.
The story takes place in Sarajevo amid a four-year siege of the city (1992-96), a bitter part of the armed strife between ethnic Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims after the breakup of Yugoslavia. During the siege, the Serbs are seeking to capture Sarajevo, a Bosnian government enclave.
Siege or not, life and crime go on. One night the local police chief, Esmir Vitas, is shot and killed by the river. Vitas is an honest cop dedicated to cracking down on gangsters who control various neighborhoods. Still, the Interior Ministry suspiciously concludes that Vitas was struck by an errant sniper bullet. It sends Inspector Vlado Petric—our hero and one of two city homicide detectives—to wrap up the case and file it away.
At the morgue, however, Petric obtains a scrap of paper from the victim’s pants pocket with a name and address. When he goes to this address, the real story, told by a former Yugoslav museum official named Milan Glavis, begins to unfold.
The story is this: At the end of WWII, representatives from countries invaded by the Nazis went to “collecting points” in Allied- and Soviet-occupied Germany to reclaim stolen art. The two men in charge of Sarajevo’s National Museum made this reclamation trip with a criminal plan in mind: to claim paintings that are not really theirs.
Using blank slips, they forged bogus art claims on hundreds of works, spiriting them back to Sarajevo, a kind of looting in reverse. The museum was too small, so they farmed out the paintings, mainly to offices and homes of the new Communist Party elite. To keep track of these transfers of art, they produced a “transfer file” with a card and notations for each artwork.
“We knew all along where everything was,” the former museum director tells Inspector Petric.
Now, in the chaos of the Sarajevo siege, a district warlord, Commander Zarko, has used his control of a city sector to round up the “transferred” art to sell it on the black market. Once Zarko is killed, however, a small group of high-ranking Interior Ministry “special police” and a few military men decided to take over the art smuggling ring. They send the art to Frankfurt for illicit sales in the West.
To pull this off, the corrupt officials have engaged in a lot of “sweet-talking UNESCO underlings and blue-helmeted shipping officers” who oversee the UN-controlled airport—the only way to ship materials out of Sarajevo.
Gradually, Inspector Petric realizes that his government superiors had probably killed Vitas to protect the smuggling operation. To investigate further could mean his own death, and yet Petric continues to dig deeper into the maze of corruption. His investigation takes him across dangerous check points and into some of the worst zones of the city. More than once, he takes a car or taxi down “Sniper Alley,” with fingers crossed.
For example, he heads for the notorious neighborhood of Dobrinja: “If Sarajevo had become a sort of hell on earth, Dobrinja was it innermost circle of despair and isolation.” The driver must avoid “shell holes and torn metal without slowing down enough to invite gunfire.” Serbian snipers are on three sides.
When the museum director-informant also shows up dead at the morgue, Petric realizes he can no longer trust his police superiors (or even his partner, who tries to kill him in the end). So he hooks up with British war correspondent Toby Perkins. Toby’s got an armored Land Rover and UN press pass to get through check points. “An art smuggle operation,” Toby realizes. “And with some very big fish involved.”
Petric also has a female ally, Amira, a “farm wife” who came to the city to survive as a prostitute outside the military barracks. She was a witness to the Vitas shooting. She ends up offering a safe house for Petric and Toby (and a place to hide paintings and the transfer file).
In this novel, artworks are not described, except for focusing on an “impressionist masterpiece” of a “field of lilies” hung in the apartment of Petric’s informant. In the last pages, this is the painting that Petric finds on its way to Frankfurt, where he hopes to use it as proof of the art crimes swirling about Sarajevo.
Readers of detective noir will find Lie in the Dark to be a familiar friend. It evokes the dark atmosphere of works such as Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Graham Greene’s The Third Man.
In the last chapter, we find Petric inside a crate with one of the paintings being shipped to Germany (indeed, the very same impressionist lilies). The crate is almost opened by guards, but since a corrupt police official knows the crate contains his latest stolen cache, he tells the guards to pass over it. This is the novel’s last satisfying twist. The plane, with Petric, is off to Germany.
The story began with Inspector Petric seeing gravediggers on a snowy hill, and in flight, he looks out a crack in the crate and sees the same snowy hill, soon to have its gravediggers at work again.
February 29, 2016
Imagining the Real Stories behind Old Dutch Portrait Paintings (no. 28)
Novelist Moggach Mixes Tulip Mania with a 17th-Century Love Triangle
AT THE GREAT art museums of the world, we typically find a northern European section with a sampling of large, dark portrait paintings of a man dressed in black with a white collar “ruff.” Beside him, his wife is similarly dressed in the austere manner of a Dutch business family of the seventeenth century.
These are the past family momentos of the wealthy mercantile class of Amsterdam’s trading empire, the sorts of people who kept Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and other now-famous painters in business with commissions.
Novelist Deborah Moggach has taken two such (fictional) husband-wife portraits and created an entire story of the two couples, the two painters, and a year-long drama that surrounds their lives. She has done so not only in an elegant, economical prose, but in a symmetrical plot that is as tight as the composition of these kinds of portraits.
And to add flavor to what essentially is a love-triangle story, the novel is set during the brief rise of the Dutch tulip market, which enriched Amsterdam for a few years, at least until the speculative “tulip economy” crashed. Thus the novel’s title, Tulip Fever (2000).
One day the painter Jan arrives at the home of the wealthy merchant Cornelius to paint him and his much younger wife, Sophia. The marriage is a pact of sorts: she wants to escape her dull, impoverish life at home, and Cornelius desires an heir. While painting, Jan lusts for Sophia, and later she reciprocates. They need to find a way to extricate her from the marriage.
The die is cast. From the start, also, the novel’s many short chapters each represent the point of view, or activity, of one of the five or so main characters. Sophia’s voice is in the first person “I,” and so her viewpoint—at first devious and later remorseful—is the primary guide through the entire story.
Another perspective is given through Maria, the maid, who is young Sophia’s best friend, despite the social chasm between them. Maria has just gotten pregnant by her bow, Willem. Fortunately, though, Willem has saved enough money to propose marriage and save Maria from an unwed scandal.
Then a misunderstanding ruins everything. One night, Sophia sneaks off to make love with Jan. She is wearing Maria’s maid cloak. Willem sees the cloak, thinking it is Maria, and follows. Peaking in the window, he thinks his Maria is having an affair with the painter. Distraught, Willem goes down to the docks, joins the navy (which is battling the English for maritime supremacy), and disappears.
Nobody knows what happened to Willem. But Sophia, with her adultery, and Maria, with her pregnancy, each have a problem. They arrive at a bizarre solution, prompting Sophia to say, “We are two reckless young women; we are in love.”
Their gambit: Sophia will pretend to be pregnant, Maria will hide her pregnancy, and when the child is born (apparently to Sophia) old Cornelius will believe that he has his heir. In such manner, Maria escapes community shunning. And Sophia, meanwhile, can fake her own death at childbirth. After that, she and Jan will escape to the East Indies.
All the while, author Moggach reminds us that painters are working all around Amsterdam. Jan is among those who will become less famous in art history, but still a painter whose work will, one day, hang in museums. Jan also has a student, Jacob, who feels betrayed when Jan plans to close his studio; this means Jacob will not receive the certificate necessary to join the guild, putting his career in jeopardy. Jacob wants revenge (and later delivers).
Jan’s plans now unravel. Taken by the tulip craze, he decides to invest all his money in the speculative tulip market. He also neglects his painting. Jan hopes to earn enough money for the East Indies escape. All might have turned out well until his drunken assistant eats a prize tulip bulb—“the most valuable tulip bulb in the world”—thinking it is an onion. “We are ruined,” Jan tells Sophia.
As Jan looks for a solution, Sophia has a sudden religious awakening and Maria bears the child. They have successfully fooled old Cornelius. Grieving at her sin, Sophia goes to the canal in a storm and (seemingly) drowns herself.
Back at home, Maria tells Cornelius the truth—it is her child. Also, Willem suddenly returns from the seas, now a tough soldier with money. Cornelius acknowledges Willem as the true father and stands aside. Cornelius then pursues Jan and Sophia on the ship they are supposed to be booked on (according to informant Jacob, the betrayed student).
And the plot now comes full circle.
Maria and Willem marry and inherit wealth from Cornelius. The rising talent Jacob paints their family portrait. Stranded on board the ship (where Jan and Sophia did not show up), Cornelius ends up in the East Indies. He goes primitive and takes up with a young native woman (never to return).
Having lost Sophia and his tulip wealth, Jan returns to painting, and indeed, in hindsight, he will become one of the great Dutch masters.
“Out of suffering he creates great art,” the narrator tells us. Jan becomes known for his Dutch genre paintings, typically great still lifes that feature the vanity objects of the wealthy classes. In one painting, he has a book opened to a page that reads in Latin, “We played, we gambled, we lost.”
Then one day, six years later, Jan is crossing the market square and a nun in a grey habit walks by. A gust flutters her veil, and Jan thinks he sees Sophia. She disappears into the monastery. By now, however, Jan is unable to know whether it is really Sophia, or, as the narrators concludes, “has dreaming her into life, into paint, so possessed him that he can no longer separate art from illusion?”
As museum guides tell us, the old Dutch family portraits are of real people who once, long ago, were civic leaders. Today, the paintings can be a bore. A novelist such as Moggach, however, has created a story that reminds us how improbable some of these lives—both of the portrait sitters and the painters—might have been.
AT THE GREAT art museums of the world, we typically find a northern European section with a sampling of large, dark portrait paintings of a man dressed in black with a white collar “ruff.” Beside him, his wife is similarly dressed in the austere manner of a Dutch business family of the seventeenth century.
These are the past family momentos of the wealthy mercantile class of Amsterdam’s trading empire, the sorts of people who kept Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and other now-famous painters in business with commissions.
Novelist Deborah Moggach has taken two such (fictional) husband-wife portraits and created an entire story of the two couples, the two painters, and a year-long drama that surrounds their lives. She has done so not only in an elegant, economical prose, but in a symmetrical plot that is as tight as the composition of these kinds of portraits.
And to add flavor to what essentially is a love-triangle story, the novel is set during the brief rise of the Dutch tulip market, which enriched Amsterdam for a few years, at least until the speculative “tulip economy” crashed. Thus the novel’s title, Tulip Fever (2000).
One day the painter Jan arrives at the home of the wealthy merchant Cornelius to paint him and his much younger wife, Sophia. The marriage is a pact of sorts: she wants to escape her dull, impoverish life at home, and Cornelius desires an heir. While painting, Jan lusts for Sophia, and later she reciprocates. They need to find a way to extricate her from the marriage.
The die is cast. From the start, also, the novel’s many short chapters each represent the point of view, or activity, of one of the five or so main characters. Sophia’s voice is in the first person “I,” and so her viewpoint—at first devious and later remorseful—is the primary guide through the entire story.
Another perspective is given through Maria, the maid, who is young Sophia’s best friend, despite the social chasm between them. Maria has just gotten pregnant by her bow, Willem. Fortunately, though, Willem has saved enough money to propose marriage and save Maria from an unwed scandal.
Then a misunderstanding ruins everything. One night, Sophia sneaks off to make love with Jan. She is wearing Maria’s maid cloak. Willem sees the cloak, thinking it is Maria, and follows. Peaking in the window, he thinks his Maria is having an affair with the painter. Distraught, Willem goes down to the docks, joins the navy (which is battling the English for maritime supremacy), and disappears.
Nobody knows what happened to Willem. But Sophia, with her adultery, and Maria, with her pregnancy, each have a problem. They arrive at a bizarre solution, prompting Sophia to say, “We are two reckless young women; we are in love.”
Their gambit: Sophia will pretend to be pregnant, Maria will hide her pregnancy, and when the child is born (apparently to Sophia) old Cornelius will believe that he has his heir. In such manner, Maria escapes community shunning. And Sophia, meanwhile, can fake her own death at childbirth. After that, she and Jan will escape to the East Indies.
All the while, author Moggach reminds us that painters are working all around Amsterdam. Jan is among those who will become less famous in art history, but still a painter whose work will, one day, hang in museums. Jan also has a student, Jacob, who feels betrayed when Jan plans to close his studio; this means Jacob will not receive the certificate necessary to join the guild, putting his career in jeopardy. Jacob wants revenge (and later delivers).
Jan’s plans now unravel. Taken by the tulip craze, he decides to invest all his money in the speculative tulip market. He also neglects his painting. Jan hopes to earn enough money for the East Indies escape. All might have turned out well until his drunken assistant eats a prize tulip bulb—“the most valuable tulip bulb in the world”—thinking it is an onion. “We are ruined,” Jan tells Sophia.
As Jan looks for a solution, Sophia has a sudden religious awakening and Maria bears the child. They have successfully fooled old Cornelius. Grieving at her sin, Sophia goes to the canal in a storm and (seemingly) drowns herself.
Back at home, Maria tells Cornelius the truth—it is her child. Also, Willem suddenly returns from the seas, now a tough soldier with money. Cornelius acknowledges Willem as the true father and stands aside. Cornelius then pursues Jan and Sophia on the ship they are supposed to be booked on (according to informant Jacob, the betrayed student).
And the plot now comes full circle.
Maria and Willem marry and inherit wealth from Cornelius. The rising talent Jacob paints their family portrait. Stranded on board the ship (where Jan and Sophia did not show up), Cornelius ends up in the East Indies. He goes primitive and takes up with a young native woman (never to return).
Having lost Sophia and his tulip wealth, Jan returns to painting, and indeed, in hindsight, he will become one of the great Dutch masters.
“Out of suffering he creates great art,” the narrator tells us. Jan becomes known for his Dutch genre paintings, typically great still lifes that feature the vanity objects of the wealthy classes. In one painting, he has a book opened to a page that reads in Latin, “We played, we gambled, we lost.”
Then one day, six years later, Jan is crossing the market square and a nun in a grey habit walks by. A gust flutters her veil, and Jan thinks he sees Sophia. She disappears into the monastery. By now, however, Jan is unable to know whether it is really Sophia, or, as the narrators concludes, “has dreaming her into life, into paint, so possessed him that he can no longer separate art from illusion?”
As museum guides tell us, the old Dutch family portraits are of real people who once, long ago, were civic leaders. Today, the paintings can be a bore. A novelist such as Moggach, however, has created a story that reminds us how improbable some of these lives—both of the portrait sitters and the painters—might have been.
February 25, 2016
And the Nobel Prize for Painting Goes to—a Novelist (no. 27)
Patrick White Ends Literary Career with Fiction about a Painter
THERE IS NO NOBEL Prize for painting. So the closest brush with this greatness has been the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was given to Australian author Patrick White, who’s last and longest novel is about a painter.
White, a kind of Faulkner of Australia, won the prize for producing an “epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” That string of novels ends in The Vivisector (1970), the story of Australian modernist painter Hurttle Duffield.
Duffield is not the kind of Dickensian character everyone knows about. But Down Under, and in literary circles, he evokes a favorite image of the modern artist: tortured—and torturing—having lived in a century of Depression, war, personal debauchery, and the art market. The renowned Australian artist Sydney Nolan—perhaps one model for White’s mosaic story—stood in for the ailing Mr. White at the Noble Prize awards, reading White’s brief comments.
Understanding The Vivisector, however, may be aided by knowing that White was also an acquaintance of the British artist Francis Bacon. As a painter of humanoid horror, Bacon was no wallflower himself: randy, fast-living, and as he said, saddled with “a weakness for alcohol and young boys.”
In any case, Duffield could be anyone between Nolan and Bacon, and others included.
The title, Vivisector, sets the macabre tone. Duffield grows up in Depression-era Australia, where cattle and slaughter underwrite the economy. In “a dirty deal,” his impoverished parents sell him to a wealthy family that wants a brother for their hunchbacked daughter. His new mother, avid for an animal humane society, is galvanized further on a family trip to London. They see a simulated vivisected dog—meaning the dog is cut open, revealing its green and purplish innards, for scientific research. “The dog’s exposed teeth were gnashing in a permanent and most realistic agony.” Sounds like a Bacon painting.
After this, Duffield conceives of “God the Vivisector,” thinking that such a being gave man both cruelty and brilliance. Duffield doesn’t believe in supreme beings, but he wants to think big about a cruel world that is dotted with occasional brilliance, perhaps, in the work of an artist. His own lifelong struggle is to capture Light itself—one painting is called Marriage of Light—in a single, end-all, transcendent painting.
Just the opposite, though, Duffield’s sees mostly darkness. His Latin tutor kills himself; young Hurttle “paints it on the wall.” He goes to the war front. On return he lives with a Sydney prostitute, Nance. For his home and studio he builds a “shack on the edge of the gorge.” After a night of drunken argument, Nance falls down the cliff. Accident, suicide, murder?
By now, Duffield has a postwar art dealer, Caldicott, a homosexual attracted to the younger artist. His dealer dies after a “long illness.” Duffield’s torturous paintings—rocks, animal forms, scenes with blood—first sell to a few rich ladies in Sydney. Then they’re scooped up in London and New York (and eventually the Tate and Museum of Modern Art).
A childhood girlfriend named Boo appears. Now she is Mrs. Davenport (or Mrs. Lopez), a wealthy art collector. She introduces Duffield to an even wealthier Greek shipping couple, and the missus—Hero Pavloussi—seduces Duffield amidst his frightening artworks. She takes him to a Greek island in pursuit of a monastic wise man (who is not there).
Later, Hero attempts suicide and finally dies of cancer. Back in Australia, Duffield becomes enamored of a young girl, Kathy Volkov, who is going on to her own fame as a concert pianist. Hurttle has seduced the girl, but world ambition calls, and she leaves him behind. On her European tour, she writes to thank him for teaching her—with his “delicious kisses and all the other lovely play”—about how to be an artist.
The great Retrospective of Duffield is now at hand. Except that Hurttle has a stroke. He is crippled in body and mind. His plan to complete a series of “God paintings”—fulfilling his early notations about “God the Vivisector”—may be delayed. In the end, he is still searching for the ultimate Light painting. His mind—in the last chapters—is filled with a confusion of words (that is, the text is like impressionistic poetry, not making any sense except in the haunting, hopeless mood White tries to create).
Some commentators have said The Vivisector is about such ideals as truth, love, and the struggling artist. Maybe so. Everyone is a candidate for struggle, although the artist-as-struggler is a convenient literary motif. The truth-love dichotomy is more interesting. Duffield says that although his paintings “deliver truth,” he’s “failed so far in love.” The truth of his ghastly paintings, in other words, gets in the way of normal relationships. Paintings aren’t always vehicles of truth, of course. They can simply be an artist’s confusion, unhappiness, and psychosis in paint.
With Patrick White the novelist, we’re talking about great and prolific literary fiction. He knows that fiction works best when it pushes the human dilemma to extremes. Such is the character of Hurttle Duffield, a vivisector of the human condition. Most painters don’t have to endure such a tortured life. Instead, they can read about it in a 617-page novel, and that is just fine.
THERE IS NO NOBEL Prize for painting. So the closest brush with this greatness has been the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was given to Australian author Patrick White, who’s last and longest novel is about a painter.
White, a kind of Faulkner of Australia, won the prize for producing an “epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.” That string of novels ends in The Vivisector (1970), the story of Australian modernist painter Hurttle Duffield.
Duffield is not the kind of Dickensian character everyone knows about. But Down Under, and in literary circles, he evokes a favorite image of the modern artist: tortured—and torturing—having lived in a century of Depression, war, personal debauchery, and the art market. The renowned Australian artist Sydney Nolan—perhaps one model for White’s mosaic story—stood in for the ailing Mr. White at the Noble Prize awards, reading White’s brief comments.
Understanding The Vivisector, however, may be aided by knowing that White was also an acquaintance of the British artist Francis Bacon. As a painter of humanoid horror, Bacon was no wallflower himself: randy, fast-living, and as he said, saddled with “a weakness for alcohol and young boys.”
In any case, Duffield could be anyone between Nolan and Bacon, and others included.
The title, Vivisector, sets the macabre tone. Duffield grows up in Depression-era Australia, where cattle and slaughter underwrite the economy. In “a dirty deal,” his impoverished parents sell him to a wealthy family that wants a brother for their hunchbacked daughter. His new mother, avid for an animal humane society, is galvanized further on a family trip to London. They see a simulated vivisected dog—meaning the dog is cut open, revealing its green and purplish innards, for scientific research. “The dog’s exposed teeth were gnashing in a permanent and most realistic agony.” Sounds like a Bacon painting.
After this, Duffield conceives of “God the Vivisector,” thinking that such a being gave man both cruelty and brilliance. Duffield doesn’t believe in supreme beings, but he wants to think big about a cruel world that is dotted with occasional brilliance, perhaps, in the work of an artist. His own lifelong struggle is to capture Light itself—one painting is called Marriage of Light—in a single, end-all, transcendent painting.
Just the opposite, though, Duffield’s sees mostly darkness. His Latin tutor kills himself; young Hurttle “paints it on the wall.” He goes to the war front. On return he lives with a Sydney prostitute, Nance. For his home and studio he builds a “shack on the edge of the gorge.” After a night of drunken argument, Nance falls down the cliff. Accident, suicide, murder?
By now, Duffield has a postwar art dealer, Caldicott, a homosexual attracted to the younger artist. His dealer dies after a “long illness.” Duffield’s torturous paintings—rocks, animal forms, scenes with blood—first sell to a few rich ladies in Sydney. Then they’re scooped up in London and New York (and eventually the Tate and Museum of Modern Art).
A childhood girlfriend named Boo appears. Now she is Mrs. Davenport (or Mrs. Lopez), a wealthy art collector. She introduces Duffield to an even wealthier Greek shipping couple, and the missus—Hero Pavloussi—seduces Duffield amidst his frightening artworks. She takes him to a Greek island in pursuit of a monastic wise man (who is not there).
Later, Hero attempts suicide and finally dies of cancer. Back in Australia, Duffield becomes enamored of a young girl, Kathy Volkov, who is going on to her own fame as a concert pianist. Hurttle has seduced the girl, but world ambition calls, and she leaves him behind. On her European tour, she writes to thank him for teaching her—with his “delicious kisses and all the other lovely play”—about how to be an artist.
The great Retrospective of Duffield is now at hand. Except that Hurttle has a stroke. He is crippled in body and mind. His plan to complete a series of “God paintings”—fulfilling his early notations about “God the Vivisector”—may be delayed. In the end, he is still searching for the ultimate Light painting. His mind—in the last chapters—is filled with a confusion of words (that is, the text is like impressionistic poetry, not making any sense except in the haunting, hopeless mood White tries to create).
Some commentators have said The Vivisector is about such ideals as truth, love, and the struggling artist. Maybe so. Everyone is a candidate for struggle, although the artist-as-struggler is a convenient literary motif. The truth-love dichotomy is more interesting. Duffield says that although his paintings “deliver truth,” he’s “failed so far in love.” The truth of his ghastly paintings, in other words, gets in the way of normal relationships. Paintings aren’t always vehicles of truth, of course. They can simply be an artist’s confusion, unhappiness, and psychosis in paint.
With Patrick White the novelist, we’re talking about great and prolific literary fiction. He knows that fiction works best when it pushes the human dilemma to extremes. Such is the character of Hurttle Duffield, a vivisector of the human condition. Most painters don’t have to endure such a tortured life. Instead, they can read about it in a 617-page novel, and that is just fine.
February 22, 2016
Novel about a Shanghai Painter-Lady Crosses West to East (no. 26)
Epstein Adds Drama to the Elusive Biography of Pan Yuliang
IN ART TEXTBOOKS we often read of how Japanese prints influenced the French Impressionists. Rarely do we hear about cultural movement in the opposite direction: How did Western painting influence Asia? In fiction, that topic was finally taken up by Jennifer Cody Epstein’s The Painter from Shanghai (2008).
Epstein earned two of her three academic degrees in Asian studies and international politics. Hence, the novel’s vista on China’s cultural experience in the early twentieth century could not be in better Western hands.
The novel recreates the story of the real-life Chinese painter Pan Yuliang, a former indentured courtesan. During cosmopolitan Shanghai’s roaring twenties, Yuliang rose to be the “famous Madame Pan,” the scandalously modern, woman painter.
In real life, Yuliang’s Impressionist-realist works were mostly of women with flowers and household accoutrements—and mostly as nudes. This Western style of painting was daring in China. Once on show, the artworks enticed the “wealthy Shanghainese and art-savvy Chinese,” the novel tells us, but also goaded detractors to label her “a threat to public decency.”
The heart of the story is Yuliang’s discovery of the Western approach to art—especially life drawing and painting the nude—amid the country’s conservative Confucian strictures on art and design. During her life at the brothel, she once mused, she’d seen the female body in so many contortions that it was impossible for the female form to shock or offend her. To the contrary, though, Yuliang posed her figures in modest elegance. Nevertheless, because they “show all,” as her nervous dealer said, they pushed the envelope in puritanical China.
The novel plays up these ironies. For example, there is open acceptance of brothels and concubines in the society. And yet paying women to be nude models at an art school becomes a public controversy. This draws our heroine’s interest. She tries at home to draw a body, even her own hand, and then has “a rush of clarity” about art. “She can draw them from life. That, of course, is why it’s called ‘life study.’”
She is taught further by a small circle of pro-Western-style artists in Shanghai (whom newspapers called “traitors to art”). One teacher says the obvious in the face of community protest: “Western artists have been performing life studies for centuries.”
After studying in Paris, Yuliang returns to China with a realist style very much akin to the more realist periods of a Matisse, Bonnard, Picasso, or Modigliani. This was at a time when art officials tied to government still editorialized that, “Renior is vulgar, Cezanne is shallow, Matisse is inferior.” Yuliang adds to their chagrin by specializing in female nudes. This seals her fate, and in 1937 she will leave China for good.
The works of the historical Pan Yuliang’s (as in Mrs. Pan) have survived in great number, totaling perhaps four thousand. Yet she did not keep a diary, preserve letters, or have her biography detailed before she died in Paris in 1977. As a result, the novelist’s touch is required to enliven The Painter from Shanghai, and it was done by Epstein in four ways.
The first half of the book is essentially about the life of a young Chinese woman sold to a house of prostitution—“the Hall”—after her parents died. The second half begins when a kindhearted businessman saves her from that life; he makes her one of his wives. With time to spare, she “scribbles,” learns about drawing, and then meets students at a Western-style art academy. She persuades its teacher to let her in, though she did not pass the entry test. “I’m better,” she says. That’s why she should get the last opening slot.
Her latent talent appears, and she wins a scholarship to study at the elite École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, she has a love affair with a young Chinese exile, Kundu, who is part of the communist movement. It wants to overthrow the old imperial system, and is competing with the Nationalists for who will dictate the new Chinese social order.
Her lover Kundu, it turns out, is a right hand man to Zhou Enlai, the future premier of Communist China. Yuliang’s tangential ties to this revolutionary circle, the “CCP cadre,” goes public back in China. As a result, her old-fashioned husband—who has energetically supported her painting career—will lose his job as the Communist-Nationalist rivalry intensifies.
A dramatic crescendo comes in 1929 in Shanghi, which Yuliang calls the “Paris of the East.” She is having a major exhibition. Rightwing thugs who support the Nationalists demolish the exhibit after they steal the paintings. “All gone,” Yuliang says, nearly broken. “Half a lifetime of work.”
The vandals leave only one painting, that of a male figure. She stomps it to pieces and says to the newspaper cameras, “There. . . . I always finish the job.” It’s kind of her motto through the story.
Yuliang is a tenacious, but beaten for the moment. She quits painting. She conforms by being a university teacher. In the end, though, she cannot bear to censure her creativity. On a final night, she embraces her devoted older husband, yearns to bear his child, but all to no avail. In his embrace, “She is already miles away.” She says to herself conclusively, “I didn’t chose to be this way. . . . I’ve tried to change. I simply can’t.”
She buys a one-way ticket to Marseilles, France, where a gallery wants to exhibit her work. Her husband believes China will get better. He thinks she is off on a holiday. She know it’s her final exile.
As a novel, The Painter from Shanghai reveals some of the ironic twists that modern art trends have taken, East and West.
One is seen in the contrast Epstein draws between the opening of Yuliang’s story and the account of the 1929 “disastrous exhibition,” which is a highpoint at the end of the novel. During that exhibit, which nearly ended her career, Yuliang’s paintings were at the cutting edge of controversy. However, in the first pages of the novel, we meet Yuliang at her Paris studio in 1957. She is still painting nude models. But it’s a time in Europe when “People don’t want girls with flowers right now. They want splashes and gashes.” In other words, abstract art has shunted aside the kind of figurative painting to which Yuliang has wedded herself.
Another twist is this: After she leaves China, the Communist Party enforces “socialist realism” as the only acceptable form of painting. The party rejects the same imperial aesthetic that Yuliang and her teachers opposed, but now it has adopted Western realism for totalitarian purposes.
Still, Yuliang feels triumphant, and still very Chinese, we can suppose. In the nonfiction world, she kept her Chinese citizenship and was buried in Chinese robes in Montmartre, the Paris hub of the artistic avant-garde during her own youthful heyday.
IN ART TEXTBOOKS we often read of how Japanese prints influenced the French Impressionists. Rarely do we hear about cultural movement in the opposite direction: How did Western painting influence Asia? In fiction, that topic was finally taken up by Jennifer Cody Epstein’s The Painter from Shanghai (2008).
Epstein earned two of her three academic degrees in Asian studies and international politics. Hence, the novel’s vista on China’s cultural experience in the early twentieth century could not be in better Western hands.
The novel recreates the story of the real-life Chinese painter Pan Yuliang, a former indentured courtesan. During cosmopolitan Shanghai’s roaring twenties, Yuliang rose to be the “famous Madame Pan,” the scandalously modern, woman painter.
In real life, Yuliang’s Impressionist-realist works were mostly of women with flowers and household accoutrements—and mostly as nudes. This Western style of painting was daring in China. Once on show, the artworks enticed the “wealthy Shanghainese and art-savvy Chinese,” the novel tells us, but also goaded detractors to label her “a threat to public decency.”
The heart of the story is Yuliang’s discovery of the Western approach to art—especially life drawing and painting the nude—amid the country’s conservative Confucian strictures on art and design. During her life at the brothel, she once mused, she’d seen the female body in so many contortions that it was impossible for the female form to shock or offend her. To the contrary, though, Yuliang posed her figures in modest elegance. Nevertheless, because they “show all,” as her nervous dealer said, they pushed the envelope in puritanical China.
The novel plays up these ironies. For example, there is open acceptance of brothels and concubines in the society. And yet paying women to be nude models at an art school becomes a public controversy. This draws our heroine’s interest. She tries at home to draw a body, even her own hand, and then has “a rush of clarity” about art. “She can draw them from life. That, of course, is why it’s called ‘life study.’”
She is taught further by a small circle of pro-Western-style artists in Shanghai (whom newspapers called “traitors to art”). One teacher says the obvious in the face of community protest: “Western artists have been performing life studies for centuries.”
After studying in Paris, Yuliang returns to China with a realist style very much akin to the more realist periods of a Matisse, Bonnard, Picasso, or Modigliani. This was at a time when art officials tied to government still editorialized that, “Renior is vulgar, Cezanne is shallow, Matisse is inferior.” Yuliang adds to their chagrin by specializing in female nudes. This seals her fate, and in 1937 she will leave China for good.
The works of the historical Pan Yuliang’s (as in Mrs. Pan) have survived in great number, totaling perhaps four thousand. Yet she did not keep a diary, preserve letters, or have her biography detailed before she died in Paris in 1977. As a result, the novelist’s touch is required to enliven The Painter from Shanghai, and it was done by Epstein in four ways.
The first half of the book is essentially about the life of a young Chinese woman sold to a house of prostitution—“the Hall”—after her parents died. The second half begins when a kindhearted businessman saves her from that life; he makes her one of his wives. With time to spare, she “scribbles,” learns about drawing, and then meets students at a Western-style art academy. She persuades its teacher to let her in, though she did not pass the entry test. “I’m better,” she says. That’s why she should get the last opening slot.
Her latent talent appears, and she wins a scholarship to study at the elite École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, she has a love affair with a young Chinese exile, Kundu, who is part of the communist movement. It wants to overthrow the old imperial system, and is competing with the Nationalists for who will dictate the new Chinese social order.
Her lover Kundu, it turns out, is a right hand man to Zhou Enlai, the future premier of Communist China. Yuliang’s tangential ties to this revolutionary circle, the “CCP cadre,” goes public back in China. As a result, her old-fashioned husband—who has energetically supported her painting career—will lose his job as the Communist-Nationalist rivalry intensifies.
A dramatic crescendo comes in 1929 in Shanghi, which Yuliang calls the “Paris of the East.” She is having a major exhibition. Rightwing thugs who support the Nationalists demolish the exhibit after they steal the paintings. “All gone,” Yuliang says, nearly broken. “Half a lifetime of work.”
The vandals leave only one painting, that of a male figure. She stomps it to pieces and says to the newspaper cameras, “There. . . . I always finish the job.” It’s kind of her motto through the story.
Yuliang is a tenacious, but beaten for the moment. She quits painting. She conforms by being a university teacher. In the end, though, she cannot bear to censure her creativity. On a final night, she embraces her devoted older husband, yearns to bear his child, but all to no avail. In his embrace, “She is already miles away.” She says to herself conclusively, “I didn’t chose to be this way. . . . I’ve tried to change. I simply can’t.”
She buys a one-way ticket to Marseilles, France, where a gallery wants to exhibit her work. Her husband believes China will get better. He thinks she is off on a holiday. She know it’s her final exile.
As a novel, The Painter from Shanghai reveals some of the ironic twists that modern art trends have taken, East and West.
One is seen in the contrast Epstein draws between the opening of Yuliang’s story and the account of the 1929 “disastrous exhibition,” which is a highpoint at the end of the novel. During that exhibit, which nearly ended her career, Yuliang’s paintings were at the cutting edge of controversy. However, in the first pages of the novel, we meet Yuliang at her Paris studio in 1957. She is still painting nude models. But it’s a time in Europe when “People don’t want girls with flowers right now. They want splashes and gashes.” In other words, abstract art has shunted aside the kind of figurative painting to which Yuliang has wedded herself.
Another twist is this: After she leaves China, the Communist Party enforces “socialist realism” as the only acceptable form of painting. The party rejects the same imperial aesthetic that Yuliang and her teachers opposed, but now it has adopted Western realism for totalitarian purposes.
Still, Yuliang feels triumphant, and still very Chinese, we can suppose. In the nonfiction world, she kept her Chinese citizenship and was buried in Chinese robes in Montmartre, the Paris hub of the artistic avant-garde during her own youthful heyday.
February 18, 2016
Goethe’s Young Werther and the Painter’s Dilemma (no. 25)
Wandering Artists can be Unlucky in Love if Not Careful
NOT MANY NOVELISTS renounce their best-selling works later in life. The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did just that with his Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a wandering artist.
Geothe wrote the novel when he was twenty-four. Young Werther has been called the stalking horse of the Romantic era in European arts and letters. And the plot explains why: Werther leaves aristocratic comfort to travel and draw. He is swept up in nature and simple village life. Then he falls for a maiden, Charlotte. But she must marry an older man. There is no way out, so Werther shoots himself in the head with a hunting pistol. No one but the gravediggers attend his funeral.
You can see why a mature Goethe—who went on to science, philosophy, epic poetry, statesmanship, and travel writing—might have looked back on his first novel with some chagrin. It is clearly autobiographical. Still, it was a marvelously-written work, and defined “bestseller” in his century. It was a kind of Twilight or Titanic storyline for the lovelorn youth of his era, sans the vampire and Leonardo Dicaprio.
The story is composed as a series of letters that Werther wrote to his friend Wilhelm. A fictional author (who is not Wilhelm) has “carefully collected” these missives, hoping that to Werther’s “spirit and character you [the reader] cannot refuse your admiration and love: to his fate you will not deny your tears.”
Throughout his letters, Werther, a draftsman who also presumably painted, delivers a paean to Nature. It is the antidote to the “rules” of society. The power or Nature also challenges Werther’s work ethic, so to speak. “I am so happy [and] so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.”
The one college-educated fellow in the countryside seeks out Werther when he learns that, as Werther explains, “I am drawing a good deal, and that I know Greek.”
Werther draws two children in happy repose. He adds to the picture “the neighboring hedge, the barn-door, and some broken cart-wheels, just as they happened to lie; and I found in about an hour that I had made a very correct and interesting drawing, without putting in the slightest thing of my own.” In other words, Werther is a convert to artistic realism (aka naturalism). This was his “resolution of adhering, for the future, entirely to nature. She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters.”
Goethe introduced the idea of “genius” into Werther’s “artistic contemplations,” and let that cat out of the bag. Sixteen years after the novel was published, the nearby Prussian philosopher Emanuel Kant took up the genius topic big time in his Critique of Judgment, and art history would never be the same. (That is, only exceptional and true artists merited the label of genius, which Kant meticulously analyzed and defined).
Werther also introduces readers to the dilemma of the artist, commented on for generations. If there is so much beauty in the world, why does the painter have to make something beautiful in a sketch or on a canvas? One theory today is that artists are inherently unhappy; they can’t be content with seeing a beautiful flower, so they must make a picture of one. Or as Werther asks, “Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?”
His friend Wilhem, however, writes back to Werther to urge him not to lose his vocational focus amid all the epiphanies. Werther replies: “You insist so much on my not neglecting my drawing . . . and yet I am unable to express myself: my powers of execution are so weak, everything seems to swim and float before me, so that I cannot make a clear, bold outline.” Here is the “painters block” that artists know so well.
Werther’s solution is to attempt to do a portrait of Charlotte, whom he loves from afar. Getting the exact likeness is not easy. He tells Wilhelm how he’s “disgraced myself” in losing his former ability to draw faces. “This is the more annoying, as I was formerly very happy in taking likenesses. I have since sketched her profile, and must content myself with that.”
In the end, the art means little. Love means everything. Werther takes his life.
Goethe lived a long life. He died at age eighty-three at the height of the Romantic era (1800-1850). If he distanced himself from the novel, perhaps as too adolescent, he remained an advocate of nature appreciation and artistic realism. His novel gave Western literature and the philosophy of art some major themes. It also produced a model for the romantic suicide, which young men would literally follow across that century.
You might say he foreshadowed the 1950s Beat Generation and after—the drug-addled Romantics of the modern American era—if you want to stretch the matter. As Werther says at one point, “Once more I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, through the world. But what else are you!”
NOT MANY NOVELISTS renounce their best-selling works later in life. The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did just that with his Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a wandering artist.
Geothe wrote the novel when he was twenty-four. Young Werther has been called the stalking horse of the Romantic era in European arts and letters. And the plot explains why: Werther leaves aristocratic comfort to travel and draw. He is swept up in nature and simple village life. Then he falls for a maiden, Charlotte. But she must marry an older man. There is no way out, so Werther shoots himself in the head with a hunting pistol. No one but the gravediggers attend his funeral.
You can see why a mature Goethe—who went on to science, philosophy, epic poetry, statesmanship, and travel writing—might have looked back on his first novel with some chagrin. It is clearly autobiographical. Still, it was a marvelously-written work, and defined “bestseller” in his century. It was a kind of Twilight or Titanic storyline for the lovelorn youth of his era, sans the vampire and Leonardo Dicaprio.
The story is composed as a series of letters that Werther wrote to his friend Wilhelm. A fictional author (who is not Wilhelm) has “carefully collected” these missives, hoping that to Werther’s “spirit and character you [the reader] cannot refuse your admiration and love: to his fate you will not deny your tears.”
Throughout his letters, Werther, a draftsman who also presumably painted, delivers a paean to Nature. It is the antidote to the “rules” of society. The power or Nature also challenges Werther’s work ethic, so to speak. “I am so happy [and] so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents. I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment; and yet I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.”
The one college-educated fellow in the countryside seeks out Werther when he learns that, as Werther explains, “I am drawing a good deal, and that I know Greek.”
Werther draws two children in happy repose. He adds to the picture “the neighboring hedge, the barn-door, and some broken cart-wheels, just as they happened to lie; and I found in about an hour that I had made a very correct and interesting drawing, without putting in the slightest thing of my own.” In other words, Werther is a convert to artistic realism (aka naturalism). This was his “resolution of adhering, for the future, entirely to nature. She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters.”
Goethe introduced the idea of “genius” into Werther’s “artistic contemplations,” and let that cat out of the bag. Sixteen years after the novel was published, the nearby Prussian philosopher Emanuel Kant took up the genius topic big time in his Critique of Judgment, and art history would never be the same. (That is, only exceptional and true artists merited the label of genius, which Kant meticulously analyzed and defined).
Werther also introduces readers to the dilemma of the artist, commented on for generations. If there is so much beauty in the world, why does the painter have to make something beautiful in a sketch or on a canvas? One theory today is that artists are inherently unhappy; they can’t be content with seeing a beautiful flower, so they must make a picture of one. Or as Werther asks, “Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art?”
His friend Wilhem, however, writes back to Werther to urge him not to lose his vocational focus amid all the epiphanies. Werther replies: “You insist so much on my not neglecting my drawing . . . and yet I am unable to express myself: my powers of execution are so weak, everything seems to swim and float before me, so that I cannot make a clear, bold outline.” Here is the “painters block” that artists know so well.
Werther’s solution is to attempt to do a portrait of Charlotte, whom he loves from afar. Getting the exact likeness is not easy. He tells Wilhelm how he’s “disgraced myself” in losing his former ability to draw faces. “This is the more annoying, as I was formerly very happy in taking likenesses. I have since sketched her profile, and must content myself with that.”
In the end, the art means little. Love means everything. Werther takes his life.
Goethe lived a long life. He died at age eighty-three at the height of the Romantic era (1800-1850). If he distanced himself from the novel, perhaps as too adolescent, he remained an advocate of nature appreciation and artistic realism. His novel gave Western literature and the philosophy of art some major themes. It also produced a model for the romantic suicide, which young men would literally follow across that century.
You might say he foreshadowed the 1950s Beat Generation and after—the drug-addled Romantics of the modern American era—if you want to stretch the matter. As Werther says at one point, “Once more I am a wanderer, a pilgrim, through the world. But what else are you!”
February 15, 2016
A Bellini Painting of a Sultan Stirs Intrigue from Venice to Istanbul (no. 24)
Goodwin Portrays the ‘Theater’ of Venetian Art and Politics
AH, BEAUTIFUL VENICE! Actually, in 1840, it was not beautiful at all, according to the setting for Jason Goodwin’s exotic detective novel, The Bellini Card (2008). Under Austrian Hapsburg rule, the city’s palaces are dilapidated, the canals muddy green, and the political intrigues nastier than ever.
All the treasures, in fact, are hidden away.
To begin this story, the new and young Sultan in Istanbul hears rumors that an Italian Renaissance painting of a past sultan, the “Great Conqueror” Mahumet II, is for sale in Venice. It’s been missing for a few generations. “If the picture exists, I wish for it,” says Sultan Abdulmecid, just taking office. “Send for Yashim.”
Yashim is author Goodwin’s unique creation, a highly-educated court eunuch and investigator, a chief fixer for the sultans. The Bellini Card is Yashim’s third adventure. In this case, however, a court bureaucrat, Resid Pasha (a pasha being a high-ranking Turkish official) intervenes. When the conniving Resid tells Yashim that it’s not necessary to go to Venice, Yashim secretly sends his friend Stanislaw Palewski, a former Polish ambassador. He arrives in Venice posing as an American art buyer named Mr. Brett.
Eventually, two Venetian dealers with information about the painting are killed. So Yashim himself glides into Venice, arriving in the disguise of a pasha (ensconced on a barge and wearing an Ottoman turban and so much else that no one can really recognize him).
One theme of the novel is that “Venice is theater,” and there’s a good many ploys taking place behind disguises and masks. Indeed, a key mystery to the novel is based on a misunderstanding because of the disguises. Back during one of the annual Venice Carnivals (famous for the use of masks), it was rumored that the new young Sultan had sneaked into sinful Venice, played cards and drank—and who knows what else—and then returned to Istanbul.
The Austrian Hapsburgs, who control Venice, believe they can use this scandalous information as possible blackmail, giving them a political upper hand over the inexperienced sultan. However, the true fact is that it was Resid Pasha—yes, wearing a mask—who had come to Venice to satiate his carnal appetites. To hide this guilty fact, Resid Pasha has sent a Tatar assassin to Venice. The assassin is to kill anyone who saw Resid Pasha at a Carnival card game. He’s also to kill the art dealers and get the Bellini painting for Resid’s own purposes.
The painting is a historical fact (as Goodwin explains in the back-of-the-book notes).
In the year 1480, the great Venetian painter Gentile Bellini had gone to Istanbul as unofficial ambassador from his republic. After meeting Sultan Mahumet II, he painted his portrait (which now hangs in the National Gallery, London). In the novel, Goodwin has the Tatar die in a storm-flooded Venetian canal, and the Bellini canvas goes down with him.
Cleverly enough, this can still jibe with true art history, however, since conceivably someone could have found the floating canvas, repainted the extensive damage—which is the real case with the painting—and mounted it on a panel. Such a repair history roughly matches the real painting’s legacy.
Goodwin is a scholar of the Byzantine Empire. A strength of the novel is the backdrop of political relations between Venice and the East and the atmospheric descriptions of both Istanbul and Venice. To add some intellectual heft, Goodwin also inserts references to an ancient Greek mathematical principle that had been recovered by the Muslims and transmitted back to Europe. It is one of the famous mathematical calculations of the Greek geometer Archimedes, a calculus known as “The Sand Reckoner.”
Archimedes wanted to estimate the size of the universe by asking, How many grains of sand would it take to fill the cosmic space? First he calculated how many grains are in, say, a square mile—he spoke of “myriad” instead of our modern mile—then extended that to a thousand square miles, and so on. He extrapolated up to cosmic proportions.
One visualized result of Archimedes’ principle of repetitive expansion would be a diagram, an eight-pointed star inside a square. The design was used in Ottoman mosaics and later in Western art. It’s also a topic the philosophical Yashim reflects upon: the diagram represents myriad connection, just like all the connections he finds in discovering who killed whom, who was really in Venice, and who has had the painting all these years.
“Nothing is still,” Yashim says. “Nothing remains the same except that pattern that lies beneath.” Back during Bellini’s visit with the sultan, in fact, the pattern stood for diplomatic amity because “the pattern reconciles . . . east with west.”
The possessor of the Bellini painting is Clara, an Italian countess (“the contessa”), who as it turns out, was also host to the Venice Carnival card game at which Resid Pasha had participated, wearing his mask, of course. Problem is, Resid got into terrible debt with his losing hands. This was another reason Resid had sent the Tatar assassin to seize the painting: the contessa had hidden the debt note on the back of the painting. The Austrians, meanwhile, also wanted to get their hands on the debt note, a key element if they ever wanted to blackmail the sultan (again, whom they thought was the man at the card game). Remember, Venice is theater.
One would do well to read some history about Venice and the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century before delving into a Goodwin novel. A lot of motives can be difficult to ferret out, for the author is not explicit: He knows it would bog down the narrative to give too much political history and explain all the social positions (pashas, dukes, contessas, courtesans, Tatars, Moors—and more).
A bit of Venetian art history passes through easily enough. The contessa’s long-lost son, a kind of idiot savant, surfaces as a forger of paintings by Canaletto, Venice’s preeminent urban landscape artist. While Bellini paintings are “not in fashion,” Titians are very upmarket. All three are famed Venetian painters.
The masked motives and masked people in The Bellini Card lend to a very complex plot. But if one can appreciate the theory—a novel about disguises—a certain satisfaction is guaranteed when, at the end, Yashim and Resid summarize what had really happened. As the narrator has warned us more than once, “Venice was theater in so many ways.”
AH, BEAUTIFUL VENICE! Actually, in 1840, it was not beautiful at all, according to the setting for Jason Goodwin’s exotic detective novel, The Bellini Card (2008). Under Austrian Hapsburg rule, the city’s palaces are dilapidated, the canals muddy green, and the political intrigues nastier than ever.
All the treasures, in fact, are hidden away.
To begin this story, the new and young Sultan in Istanbul hears rumors that an Italian Renaissance painting of a past sultan, the “Great Conqueror” Mahumet II, is for sale in Venice. It’s been missing for a few generations. “If the picture exists, I wish for it,” says Sultan Abdulmecid, just taking office. “Send for Yashim.”
Yashim is author Goodwin’s unique creation, a highly-educated court eunuch and investigator, a chief fixer for the sultans. The Bellini Card is Yashim’s third adventure. In this case, however, a court bureaucrat, Resid Pasha (a pasha being a high-ranking Turkish official) intervenes. When the conniving Resid tells Yashim that it’s not necessary to go to Venice, Yashim secretly sends his friend Stanislaw Palewski, a former Polish ambassador. He arrives in Venice posing as an American art buyer named Mr. Brett.
Eventually, two Venetian dealers with information about the painting are killed. So Yashim himself glides into Venice, arriving in the disguise of a pasha (ensconced on a barge and wearing an Ottoman turban and so much else that no one can really recognize him).
One theme of the novel is that “Venice is theater,” and there’s a good many ploys taking place behind disguises and masks. Indeed, a key mystery to the novel is based on a misunderstanding because of the disguises. Back during one of the annual Venice Carnivals (famous for the use of masks), it was rumored that the new young Sultan had sneaked into sinful Venice, played cards and drank—and who knows what else—and then returned to Istanbul.
The Austrian Hapsburgs, who control Venice, believe they can use this scandalous information as possible blackmail, giving them a political upper hand over the inexperienced sultan. However, the true fact is that it was Resid Pasha—yes, wearing a mask—who had come to Venice to satiate his carnal appetites. To hide this guilty fact, Resid Pasha has sent a Tatar assassin to Venice. The assassin is to kill anyone who saw Resid Pasha at a Carnival card game. He’s also to kill the art dealers and get the Bellini painting for Resid’s own purposes.
The painting is a historical fact (as Goodwin explains in the back-of-the-book notes).
In the year 1480, the great Venetian painter Gentile Bellini had gone to Istanbul as unofficial ambassador from his republic. After meeting Sultan Mahumet II, he painted his portrait (which now hangs in the National Gallery, London). In the novel, Goodwin has the Tatar die in a storm-flooded Venetian canal, and the Bellini canvas goes down with him.
Cleverly enough, this can still jibe with true art history, however, since conceivably someone could have found the floating canvas, repainted the extensive damage—which is the real case with the painting—and mounted it on a panel. Such a repair history roughly matches the real painting’s legacy.
Goodwin is a scholar of the Byzantine Empire. A strength of the novel is the backdrop of political relations between Venice and the East and the atmospheric descriptions of both Istanbul and Venice. To add some intellectual heft, Goodwin also inserts references to an ancient Greek mathematical principle that had been recovered by the Muslims and transmitted back to Europe. It is one of the famous mathematical calculations of the Greek geometer Archimedes, a calculus known as “The Sand Reckoner.”
Archimedes wanted to estimate the size of the universe by asking, How many grains of sand would it take to fill the cosmic space? First he calculated how many grains are in, say, a square mile—he spoke of “myriad” instead of our modern mile—then extended that to a thousand square miles, and so on. He extrapolated up to cosmic proportions.
One visualized result of Archimedes’ principle of repetitive expansion would be a diagram, an eight-pointed star inside a square. The design was used in Ottoman mosaics and later in Western art. It’s also a topic the philosophical Yashim reflects upon: the diagram represents myriad connection, just like all the connections he finds in discovering who killed whom, who was really in Venice, and who has had the painting all these years.
“Nothing is still,” Yashim says. “Nothing remains the same except that pattern that lies beneath.” Back during Bellini’s visit with the sultan, in fact, the pattern stood for diplomatic amity because “the pattern reconciles . . . east with west.”
The possessor of the Bellini painting is Clara, an Italian countess (“the contessa”), who as it turns out, was also host to the Venice Carnival card game at which Resid Pasha had participated, wearing his mask, of course. Problem is, Resid got into terrible debt with his losing hands. This was another reason Resid had sent the Tatar assassin to seize the painting: the contessa had hidden the debt note on the back of the painting. The Austrians, meanwhile, also wanted to get their hands on the debt note, a key element if they ever wanted to blackmail the sultan (again, whom they thought was the man at the card game). Remember, Venice is theater.
One would do well to read some history about Venice and the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century before delving into a Goodwin novel. A lot of motives can be difficult to ferret out, for the author is not explicit: He knows it would bog down the narrative to give too much political history and explain all the social positions (pashas, dukes, contessas, courtesans, Tatars, Moors—and more).
A bit of Venetian art history passes through easily enough. The contessa’s long-lost son, a kind of idiot savant, surfaces as a forger of paintings by Canaletto, Venice’s preeminent urban landscape artist. While Bellini paintings are “not in fashion,” Titians are very upmarket. All three are famed Venetian painters.
The masked motives and masked people in The Bellini Card lend to a very complex plot. But if one can appreciate the theory—a novel about disguises—a certain satisfaction is guaranteed when, at the end, Yashim and Resid summarize what had really happened. As the narrator has warned us more than once, “Venice was theater in so many ways.”
February 11, 2016
A ‘Cozy’ Detective Plot Gives Artists Motives to Kill Critics (no. 23)
Chief Inspector Gamache Probes the Canadian Art Scene
SOME PLOT DEVICES in fiction are never out of season, especially in detective mysteries.
Agatha Christie created one indelible format with her And Then There Were None (1939). A group of people are invited to an island estate. The next morning one of them is dead. Everyone is stranded there for the rest of the story. Each person is a momentary suspect (at least until he or she also is murdered).
Of modern-day writers, the Canadian author Louise Penny has probably best applied this “Agatha Christie formula” to the art world. Indeed, Penny is a three time winner of the Agatha Christie Award for detective novels.
In Penny’s A Trick of the Light (2011), a cast of art world characters attend a party at the home of fifty-something artist Clara Morrow, who has just broken through with a heralded painting exhibit at the famed Musée in Montreal. Clara lives in the nearby rural town of Three Pines with her artist husband, Peter.
The next morning, an unexpected visitor—and childhood friend of Clara—is found chocked to death in the garden. She is Lilian, who had given up an artist career to become an acerbic art critic at a Canadian newspaper. And because Lilian’s caustic reviews had ruined more than a few artist careers, any of the art world people celebrating Clara’s exhibition might have a motive to kill her.
A Trick of Light is Penny’s seventh installment of her Chief Inspector Gamache series. So naturally, Gamache arrives in Three Pines. He sets up his homicide shop and starts going down the list of suspects. The list is considerable, with motives seemingly everywhere.
Even after the murder, and after the party, the key characters find reasons to stay around Three Pines. This makes it convenient in the end for all of them to be in the same hotel restaurant when Gamache (as a Christie-style detective) reveals the logic of his deductions and fingers the culprit, who then, in turn, vents all the reasons for the murder.
Besides the art world themes, two other topics weigh heavily in this village melodrama. One is a foray into the Montreal Alcoholics Anonymous, to which the victim and at least two suspects belong. A second keynote is marital tension. Of the four marriages mentioned in the story, three are about to end in separation or divorce. Gamache’s marriage is the only one that escapes the turmoil.
Through the character of Clara Morrow, Penny explores the interior life of all artists, the vast majority of whom will never have the luck that Clara has had—finally being discovered, if late in life. For that matter, an array of art-world players are dissected by Penny with surprising insight and subtlety.
There may be a few howlers, nevertheless. At one point in the dialogue, characters joke at how everyone says artworks are “stunning,” making it a meaningless term. Yet at the same time, the sincere dialogue speaks of the “genius” of paintings by Clara and by Lilian, as if the two talented ladies share a perch with Einstein and Michelangelo.
It is the critics from New York to London who have declared Clara the artist of the hour, however. And it's that acclaim that draws the art glitterati to her Three Pines art party. Penny takes us through the crowd, where we find jealousy, the politics of art shows and art dealers, and the clashing tastes in art styles. The party draws three cagey art dealers. A suspicious art couple lingers about. Then there is husband Peter, an unsuccessful avant-garde painter. He has long belittled Clara’s traditional paintings, but now those paintings have shot to fame.
One clue soon jumps out. During her art critic days, Lilian had written that one Canadian artist was “a natural, producing art like a bodily function.” Everyone in the Canadian art world remembers the slur, but no one can remember who Lilian was writing about. Indeed, this person seems to be the killer, wreaking revenge on Lilian, who had suggested that the art was human waste.
By the end, we think the killer must be an artist named Suzanne. She was Lilian’s friend at the AA meetings. After a novel-long search in old newspapers, one of Chief Inspector Gamache’s staff finds that Lilian’s “bodily function” review was about Suzanne’s art work. The tarring had ended Suzanne’s artistic career. The junior cops believe they’ve wrapped up the case (since by now, Suzanne has lied several times).
But the philosophically-inclined chief inspector is wiser.
As Gamache plods along (this is a kind of “cozy” mystery, after all, with dialogue that is both clever and illuminating), he probes one red herring (false lead) after another. He agrees that someone had killed Lilian for her abusive reviews, but for him the timing and scene of the crime are the most crucial.
Everyone finally gathers in the Three Pines hotel. Chief Inspector Gamache unfurls his impeccable logic. One of the art dealers is the murderer, he declares, naming the name and pointing the finger. The assembly is shocked. Before the dealer went into the business, he too had aspired to be an artist. But critic Lilian had cut him off at the knees. As Gamache also explains, the dealer wanted to tarnish Clara’s success by having a murder blight her art party: the dealer had once represented Clara, later terminated her at the gallery, and now resents her success without him.
One red herring was interesting from the start. Clara and Lilian had been best friends as girls. Both became aspiring young artists. But Lilian had stolen Clara’s ideas, so they had a bitter falling out. At one point, Lilian’s parents accuse Clara of killing Lilian over that past hostility.
In the end, however, the story returns to clueless Peter, husband of the now famous artist, Clara Morrow. Clara believes that because Peter is not truly happy about her astounding success, he does not truly love her. She asks Peter to leave for a year (a modern marriage solution?). It’s take-a-break time for some artistic soul-searching. In all, a well-plotted cozy that also, inescapably, has a message, probably about women in the art world.
SOME PLOT DEVICES in fiction are never out of season, especially in detective mysteries.
Agatha Christie created one indelible format with her And Then There Were None (1939). A group of people are invited to an island estate. The next morning one of them is dead. Everyone is stranded there for the rest of the story. Each person is a momentary suspect (at least until he or she also is murdered).
Of modern-day writers, the Canadian author Louise Penny has probably best applied this “Agatha Christie formula” to the art world. Indeed, Penny is a three time winner of the Agatha Christie Award for detective novels.
In Penny’s A Trick of the Light (2011), a cast of art world characters attend a party at the home of fifty-something artist Clara Morrow, who has just broken through with a heralded painting exhibit at the famed Musée in Montreal. Clara lives in the nearby rural town of Three Pines with her artist husband, Peter.
The next morning, an unexpected visitor—and childhood friend of Clara—is found chocked to death in the garden. She is Lilian, who had given up an artist career to become an acerbic art critic at a Canadian newspaper. And because Lilian’s caustic reviews had ruined more than a few artist careers, any of the art world people celebrating Clara’s exhibition might have a motive to kill her.
A Trick of Light is Penny’s seventh installment of her Chief Inspector Gamache series. So naturally, Gamache arrives in Three Pines. He sets up his homicide shop and starts going down the list of suspects. The list is considerable, with motives seemingly everywhere.
Even after the murder, and after the party, the key characters find reasons to stay around Three Pines. This makes it convenient in the end for all of them to be in the same hotel restaurant when Gamache (as a Christie-style detective) reveals the logic of his deductions and fingers the culprit, who then, in turn, vents all the reasons for the murder.
Besides the art world themes, two other topics weigh heavily in this village melodrama. One is a foray into the Montreal Alcoholics Anonymous, to which the victim and at least two suspects belong. A second keynote is marital tension. Of the four marriages mentioned in the story, three are about to end in separation or divorce. Gamache’s marriage is the only one that escapes the turmoil.
Through the character of Clara Morrow, Penny explores the interior life of all artists, the vast majority of whom will never have the luck that Clara has had—finally being discovered, if late in life. For that matter, an array of art-world players are dissected by Penny with surprising insight and subtlety.
There may be a few howlers, nevertheless. At one point in the dialogue, characters joke at how everyone says artworks are “stunning,” making it a meaningless term. Yet at the same time, the sincere dialogue speaks of the “genius” of paintings by Clara and by Lilian, as if the two talented ladies share a perch with Einstein and Michelangelo.
It is the critics from New York to London who have declared Clara the artist of the hour, however. And it's that acclaim that draws the art glitterati to her Three Pines art party. Penny takes us through the crowd, where we find jealousy, the politics of art shows and art dealers, and the clashing tastes in art styles. The party draws three cagey art dealers. A suspicious art couple lingers about. Then there is husband Peter, an unsuccessful avant-garde painter. He has long belittled Clara’s traditional paintings, but now those paintings have shot to fame.
One clue soon jumps out. During her art critic days, Lilian had written that one Canadian artist was “a natural, producing art like a bodily function.” Everyone in the Canadian art world remembers the slur, but no one can remember who Lilian was writing about. Indeed, this person seems to be the killer, wreaking revenge on Lilian, who had suggested that the art was human waste.
By the end, we think the killer must be an artist named Suzanne. She was Lilian’s friend at the AA meetings. After a novel-long search in old newspapers, one of Chief Inspector Gamache’s staff finds that Lilian’s “bodily function” review was about Suzanne’s art work. The tarring had ended Suzanne’s artistic career. The junior cops believe they’ve wrapped up the case (since by now, Suzanne has lied several times).
But the philosophically-inclined chief inspector is wiser.
As Gamache plods along (this is a kind of “cozy” mystery, after all, with dialogue that is both clever and illuminating), he probes one red herring (false lead) after another. He agrees that someone had killed Lilian for her abusive reviews, but for him the timing and scene of the crime are the most crucial.
Everyone finally gathers in the Three Pines hotel. Chief Inspector Gamache unfurls his impeccable logic. One of the art dealers is the murderer, he declares, naming the name and pointing the finger. The assembly is shocked. Before the dealer went into the business, he too had aspired to be an artist. But critic Lilian had cut him off at the knees. As Gamache also explains, the dealer wanted to tarnish Clara’s success by having a murder blight her art party: the dealer had once represented Clara, later terminated her at the gallery, and now resents her success without him.
One red herring was interesting from the start. Clara and Lilian had been best friends as girls. Both became aspiring young artists. But Lilian had stolen Clara’s ideas, so they had a bitter falling out. At one point, Lilian’s parents accuse Clara of killing Lilian over that past hostility.
In the end, however, the story returns to clueless Peter, husband of the now famous artist, Clara Morrow. Clara believes that because Peter is not truly happy about her astounding success, he does not truly love her. She asks Peter to leave for a year (a modern marriage solution?). It’s take-a-break time for some artistic soul-searching. In all, a well-plotted cozy that also, inescapably, has a message, probably about women in the art world.
Novelists on Artists
A blog exploring the ways that fiction, past and present, has portrayed artists and the art world. By Larry Witham, author of Gallery Pieces: An Art Mystery.
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