Nov
5
Balzac’s Frenhofer vs. Lucian Freud
Filed Under Visual Art, Fiction |
Do you have friends who admit to you that they’ve always wanted to read Moby Dick, but they haven’t Some make that admission with a certain spirit of defiance (”I don’t give a shit about the canon!”) and others still with a coy sheepishness. My shameful deficiency as a reader lies in my stubborn refusal to read Jane Austen. I’ve read some passages from her novels as assignments, but I’ve not yet read any of her novels. I have no idea why not, as I find her writing remarkable from what little I’ve read. One of these summers, though, I’m going to make it a Jane Austen season, start a book club, and write about my experience about how Austen’s novels actually mirror my life. What a totally unique idea! Perhaps they’ll make a movie of it.
Let’s move on to another category of writers: there are still other authors whom we’ve actually read, but we just don’t understand why they’re so honored and venerated. Some of my friends actively dislike Proust and Tolstoy. As much as I love Sebald, a few of my friends can’t stand his writing. For me, a writer who belongs to that category is Balzac. You can come at me with an arsenal of explanations - historical, theoretical, aesthetic, etc. - and I’m sure I will fall asleep on you; I’ve heard them before. I mean, I loved the depiction of the literary market and the commodification of the print culture in Lost Illusions, thought it was brilliant. But in the end, I just don’t like his stories. The characters. Lucien’s capitulation to cheap journalism in Lost Illusions, sacrificing his artistic ambition. Frenhofer’s misunderstood painting in The Unknown Masterpiece.
I guess what chafes at me is Balzac’s constant idealization of the creative Genius. I find it almost revolting, and one-dimensional in its concept, especially in The Unknown Masterpiece. In The Unknown Masterpiece, the painter Frenhofer, the sole disciple of Mabuse, paints what is probably the first proto-Modernist canvas in Paris of early 1600’s. A. C. Danto has a wonderful introduction in the NYRB edition, discussing real painters, like Picasso and Cezanne, who were influenced by Balzac’s depiction of the fictional Frenhofer. So I was very disappointed to find out that most of the novella’s pages were devoted to insipid ideas about art - “it’s like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements” - and the geniuses who create such an art. (When Frenhofer is talking madly about the process of his painting, the elder painter Porbus tells Poussin to be quiet because the master is literally talking to his own genius. Really.) It was like reading a part of Kant’s Critique of Judgement as interpreted and severely diluted by an enthusiastic schoolboy.
Perhaps my failure as a reader of Balzac is that somehow, I cannot historicize, rotate on the same axis with him. My empathy does not reach out to him. Perhaps I’m just a brat of today’s age, too jaded to condone the romantic notion of genius; with Balzac, I just cannot see the forest for the trees. (Won’t.)
In The Unknown Masterpiece, Frenhofer paints quickly, like a demon, in frenetic movements (you know, because he’s a mad genius.) The subject of his proto-modernist canvas is a nude portrait of his dead beloved, Catherine Lescault, and so, how could I not think of Lucian Freud in comparison, probably the foremost painter of nude figures in our era There was an engaging article last month in the Telegraph UK, about Freud’s process of painting Ria, Naked Portrait 2007, which is showing at the Tate right now and will eventually make its way to the States so it could be bought by some hedge-funder.
Apparently, Freud spotted Ria Kirby, who was an art handler at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and felt that he could paint her. Kirby was obviously flattered that Freud wanted her to sit for him, and agreed. Freud started to paint her in April of 2006. The process would go on for sixteen months, every day for five hours, seven days a week, except for the four evenings they took off in respite. That’s more than 2400 hours. The article mentions that Freud’s criterion for determining the end of a project is based on his intuition: that he feels as though he’s working on someone else’s painting. That there is no more room for his input. As methodical and bureaucratic as Freud seems to be, his way of understanding when the picture is finished seems to be in line with Frenhofer’s similar intuition - that a true painter perseveres until “nature is forced to show herself stark naked.” But unlike Frenhofer, who kept the nude portrait of his beloved Catherine Lescault veiled because he would not distinguish between art and life, Freud could paint his subject, Ria, primarily because - according to the article - she was congenial and punctual, a nice person. In Freud’s Ria, the woman’s body is not merely eroticized by the artist’s gaze, whereas in Frenhofer’s, she is trapped by it, always and forever sexualized.
(Photographs by David Dawson)
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