Going, going, gone – Van Gogh (3)

As I have previously discussed (here and here), with the interest and anticipation of the lay person, the Cox Collection was duly auctioned on November 11 by Christie’s – far, far exceeding expectations, it brought in nearly $332 million! My attention was focused on the Van Gogh works, and according to Art News an agent (waving the paddle 619) took home the haystack and the cypress and olive trees (the latter for a staggering $71 million!) – for the same buyer or different is not known. Given the secrecy, I think it is fair to guess that these remarkable works of art, already so rarely seen, will disappear again into a private collection and we – the greater public – can bid [sic!] farewell to their public viewing anytime soon (as with the Portrait of Dr Gachet which disappeared after being sold in 1990 for $82.5m – also by Christie’s). And the fate of the much talked about red-haired, pink-cheeked, flower-chewing boy/girl that so entranced me, and that I considered – seriously showing my art market acumen – to be seriously undervalued (and, I was right; estimated at $5-7 million it sold for $46.7 million!) seems likely to be the same; even in reproduction, I love this picture – ‘they’ would have found a better home with ‘us’ for sure. But who knows, maybe the buyers are fans of the share economy – to be stretched beyond cars and couches and such pedestrian comforts to the much finer things of life (and commerce).

Martin Bailey, who has definitely become my person to go to on all things Van Gogh, blogs on the outcomes of an eventful (not to mention, profitable!) evening in New York.

Writing to remember

Patrick Modiano: “Invisible Ink” (2021)

With not even 150 pages, Patrick Modiano’s latest novel to be translated, Encre sympathique (Gallimard, 2019), is a very quick read indeed. As with so many of the French works that I have turned to in recent times, including other works by Modiano, it too was read in the German translation: Unsichtbare Tinte (trans. by Elisabeth Edl).

And a fine and evocative read it is. Modiano’s reflection upon time and memory is as always exquisite. And as always, people, things, situations disappear and fade over time, but are always lurking there in the crevices of unconscious thought, ready to be awakened and hauled into the present – to be then something other than that which they once were. Or as one thought, for who’s to say just how precise any memory is to the actuality of an event? And who (or what) defines the actual, anyway?

In a search to fill all the empty spaces in a life, the novel’s narrator struggles against the unreliability of his own memories and motivations, and he struggles against the forgetting – which is not quite the same thing as the not remembering. And that has been the life work of his creator; Patrick Mondiano’s gift to his country and the world: all his stories of occupied and post-war Paris and France; often heavy but written with a lightness of being, sometimes dark but uncompromising in demanding of a reader the same degree of reflection and moral fortitude with which he writes.

There is a plot – a mystery, detective story of sorts (explained well in this review at The Spectator) – and it is the scaffolding that supports, holds together, all the fragmentary memories as they traverse time and take us with them; speaking to us from a present back some thirty odd years with some stops in-between, and with the promise of an “end” in the here and now. There is, this time at least, some light at the end of the tunnel.

Mysterious, I said; and that’s what so entrances me when I am reading Modiano: a moodiness, a haziness; as if something not quite tangible is always looming close, never to be wholly captured. (I transgress! I imagine myself now in a smoke-filled Parisian jazz club in the fifties or sixties! Though, in his Nobel Prize lecture, when Modiano speaks of his envy of music being better able to encapsulate the essence of a moment as a continuity of thought and experience, he makes reference to Chopin’s nocturnes – also, to be played in the late hours under the muted light of a different sort of venue I could imagine.) Some may find his style old-fashioned, and I have heard it said that he has only one story that he retells over, and over again, albeit beautifully so. But I disagree, well, not on the last said – I do very well appreciate the unique stylistic elements of Modiano’s writing and his identifiable voice – but only a very superficial consideration could be so dismissive. Yes, perhaps the time frame and the way he approaches that, and Paris, of course, are constants, but I actually feel the ageing of this writer, and not in a negative way, rather I admire how the years affect his retrospection – on other generations and the societies in which they interacted with – and that look is not static. What he has, is an absolute integrity, a commitment to using the power of his pen, his words, to ward off the insidious human tendency of forgetting that which shouldn’t.

As I write, there is another new work from Patrick Modiano, published by Gallimard, again of novella length, and one can imagine translations will be available in a timely fashion.

Small town truths

Be it in the ports and industrial centers of Britain or those of continental Europe, or whether just another small town, like that of Angoulême in south-west France, of which Emma Rothschild tells of in this aeon article, the tentacles of the slave trade and the societies that subsisted from its labors and the wealth accrued through its brutality and the denial of human dignity, stretch across oceans and continents and are indelibly entwined throughout much of modern history; from out of the so-called Age of Discovery, through the years of “revolution” and “enlightenment” and beyond.

Slavery; certainly, long (or belatedly) recognized by most as a monumental moral failing, but too often regarded as an unfortunate consequence of the human quest for improvement and expansion – a weak defense of colonialism and tainted by theories of race and white superiority. Only in the most recent of times, have the complicated threads of slavery come to the forefront of research and public discourse, and as being more than just a factor, but a defining factor, in the course of the Modern era, and one still having a profound (and detrimental) effect on societies around the world. A history revolving around the once accepted narratives of great men and great events has been, if not superseded, greatly complemented by this shifting focus. If telling the story of slavery is long overdue, it is also an important consequence that in doing so other influencing strands in the historical narrative have gained traction – of families, of women and children, about work and play; in other words, the stories of ordinary people who lived and died, who made good choices and bad, and were never just the set decorations to the epochs adorned with the jewels of State – monarchs, politics and church.

Emma Rothschild’s essay compliments her latest book, An Infinite History, in which she explores the extended family of her subject over many generations, bringing to the fore, amongst other things, a complicity in slavery – to be read as a microcosm of that of a greater society, and the responsibilities that follow out of that. As she explains it:

[…] An Infinite History is a micro-history, in the sense that it starts with an individual, and it is also a medium-scale and even a macro-history, in the sense that it moves outwards from the individual, by the relationship of contiguity, to her immediate family, to her acquaintances and neighbours, in the social space of Angoulême, and to her posterity over time. It has turned out, along the way, to be a history of what individuals knew about far-off slavery, and of what it meant in their lives.

Slavery en famille, aeon, 1 October 2021

Emma Rothschild’s book, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries is published by Princeton Press, and there is more information on their website, including a Q. and A. with the author, and another short essay on the “hidden economic lives of women”; also a concern Rothschild develops in her book. I should say, the book has its own website with a number of interesting resources; for example, a family tree and maps.

Below embedded is a short taster about the book – a project, really, on a particular way of telling history – on SOUNDCLOUD.

“An Infinite History” by Emma Rothschild, Princeton University Press, 2021.

House and Garden

Reading (and looking at: some terrific photos!) in this delightful NYT magazine piece about Olivia Laing’s country home in Suffolk, I find myself reminded of many things. Firstly, it prompted a childhood reminiscence of what a wonderful gardener my father was and how much I loved helping him, and how a long ago birthday gift of a simple plastic yellow watering-can is still before my inner eye, and how life then got complicated and time did its own thing with little regard for me, and it came to be that I’ve never had the opportunity to have a garden that I could call my own. And that makes me sad. And, and, and … Secondly, the Derek Jarman journal, Modern Nature, that Laing refers to has been asking to be read by me for a long time – in the UK at least it has a sort of legendary status. And, thirdly (but not really lastly), Laing’s own 2011 book – and her first – To the River, as a “rumination”, inspired by Virginia Woolf and which has her wandering the length of the River Ouse. What that rumination entails I could guess at – but need to know. Two more books.

But this is all a bit by the bye, what really diverted me – as so often happens – was an internal link to the NYT “By the Book” segment from earlier this year in which Olivia Laing was guest and her mention there of Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants that she had read while writing her latest book Everybody (2021), saying: “[…it] is astonishing on the complex interrelations between bodies and class, bodies and gender…”. Light’s original work has come to my attention previously, and Virginia Woolf’s erratic behaviour towards her domestics is well known, and has often been a topic in academia and beyond. And something I have often contemplated.

But my interest at this moment has added intensity because, while reflecting on the mutual dependencies and alternating dynamics at play between Myriam and Louise in the Leïla Slimani novel just read, I was immediately struck by similarities with what I had discerned previously about Woolf’s fraught relationship with her servants, especially Nellie with whom she was in constant struggle; and perhaps encouraged in my thinking having shortly before read an “address as essay” by Slimani in which she quotes from a Woolf essay contrasting the status of the Victorian woman of a certain class – the so-called “Angel in the House” – with the (then) modern woman; the possibilities now open to her, but also the obstacles, sometimes invisible, that remain in her search for fulfillment, and especially when that reach is beyond the sacred bounds of home and garden, of family and servants.

I have downloaded Light’s book (Kindle link below), and have to say the prologue and the early pages – here, the “angel in the house” is Julia Stephen and the cook, Sophie Farrell, the “family treasure”- are a knockout. Already I can say, obviously a labor of love; written with verve and with respect for the subjects and their successes – large or small, celebrated or rarely noted – and an understanding for their failures and the prevailing circumstances – personal or societal or both.

I am, then, as I write, feeling madly indebted to Olivia Laing – and it is hardly to be wondered; to the question of what was the best book she has received as a gift comes the response:

[…] For my 40th birthday my mother gave me first editions of Woolf’s diaries. That was a magical present. I remember being entranced by the bindings as a child — the pale pink and duck egg blue spines with Bloomsbury crosshatching. Those would be my desert island books: the best possible mind to be accompanied by.

The New York Times “By the Book: Olivia Laing’s Reading Piles Are Far From Organized”

Mine are not nearly so fine, but Olivia Laing would surely with me agree: it’s all there to be found in the mind – and Virginia Woolf would add: words, words, words.

When the bough breaks

As mentioned here, Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (The Perfect Nanny in the US and Lullaby in the UK), in German translation as Dann schlaf auch du, did become available in my local library, and sooner than expected, and has now been read by me in the last day or so.

With a narrative that traverses the terrains of crime, suspense and underpinned by what could be interpreted as a social criticism of some aspects of modern family politics, and written in Slimani’s cool and precise style (I actually had the opportunity to browse the French original as I read the German edition), the novel makes for a rapid and compelling read. But, it is anything other than a comforting one. Not the butler, the nanny dun it – that much we know. When from the opening pages one is confronted with such a monstrous conclusion, the reader can not help but become engrossed in the quest to know the whole damned course of getting there.

Welcome into the hyper-stressed sphere of the restless Parisian middle class of young professionals; trying to organize careers and families, to keep up with …whoever are the French version of the Joneses, and ever alert to the social order and codes of their cohort. Such a couple are Paul and Myriam Massé, and they are much more of course, and Slimani develops them well; giving them contour – and contradiction. They interest me these thirty-somethings – juggling their ambitions with mounting insecurities seemingly at odds with their privileges. But with the family perfection of little girl Mila and baby boy Adam complete, Paul, who had found some favor and convenience in the one-partner-at-home model (in this case, the woman – surprise, surprise!), reluctantly acquiesces to the stressed and dissatisfied Myriam’s desire to return to her interrupted legal profession – so, the perfect nanny it must be; and it seems that Louise is just that.

I can well conjure a Paul and Myriam (perhaps I have known enough like them, or at least been informed of), but Louise remains to the very end a mystery to me, a mass of contradictions – her awkwardness in manner and speech; still, secretive, stubborn; a petite stature belying her vigor and strength; her plain, dated attire (peter pan collars we are told!) offset by cheap make-up – worn upon a face often described by the author as “moon face” or “doll face”. It irritated me that I was unable to form in my mind’s eye a more complete image of her. But perhaps that was the writer’s intent or at least an accident of the writer’s imagination: Dear reader, Slimani may be saying, think of Louise as an apparition blurred under the pale light of a full moon or some malleable figure with features painted upon china or plastic; garishly exact and without blemish. Neither are real, both an illusion. A mother’s worst nightmare.

For some readers, without proximity or at least awareness of the particular young, urban, professional milieu in which one is being drawn, the sociological aspects that may be read into the novel are somewhat elusive, and perhaps even inadequate as an explanation for the development of the plot; which I interpreted more as being psychologically driven. But deep seated norms are there to be extricated, and ultimately play an important role in the tragic human consequences. Parental choices made in modern societies are clearly complex – professional, financial, emotional considerations aplenty. But before that comes the choice to be a parent, and especially Myriam wonders at that; wonders at her own inadequacy and ineptitude – so conditioned is she in the absoluteness of the maternal role. Myriam thought she could have it all, failed to recognize the obstacles in her way, that cared not for her education, her abilities, saw only her sex. And wrong choices can be made, and most do not end with such a monstrous crime. (It should be said, Leïla Slimani based her novel on a 2012 murder in Manhattan; keeping some of the personal and class characteristics that were reported but transporting the situational to Paris.)

Expectations of a mutually beneficial alliance are negligible and the potential for conflict are high; for those (predominately) women who work in child care in some form or other – women like Louise and all those other nounous in the Parisian playgrounds – are often employed under precarious circumstances and for low wages. They may be immigrants or foreigners, students perhaps, and in this, Louise, as a white middle-aged French woman, differs; here, Slimani may have been deliberately making a character choice that defies the delusions of a society entrenched in its belief that all dangers come from without. Paul and Myriam could barely hide their satisfaction at not having to navigate the hurdles (as some of their friends must) brought into their home by a foreign custom or language.

Continue reading…

In passing…

may I remind myself to reactivate my paused Netflix account! My morning peruse of The New York Times alerts me to the coming soon (Nov. 10) of Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing which I wrote about at the beginning of the year.

In her excellent NYT piece, Alexandra Kleeman not only offers a wonderful portrait of Rebecca Hall – the privileged and complicated biography that so informed her film making, the difficulties of financing and maintaining her artistic integrity – but also revisits her own first encounters with Larsen’s novel and reflects upon her own multi-racial heritage. Kleeman’s appreciation of the monochromatic aesthetic and the grey areas in-between where truth resides is about the best thing about film I have read in a long time.

Unbeknownst to me in the months since the film was previewed at Sundance, there has been an enormous amount of banter, especially surrounding the social and historical phenomena of “passing” and how it should be portrayed, and the various degrees of “colorism” that remain prevalent in society and reflected in Hollywood (or vice versa!), and the casting choices that are (or are not) made accordingly.

Surely, I will have more to say after seeing Hall’s film.

On haystacks and cornflowers – Van Gogh (2)

From my last post, The New York Times has now published an article on Christie’s forthcoming auction that will include three works from Vincent van Gogh; one of which is the Meules de Blé of which I wrote, stolen by the Nazis and only now returning to the public arena.

Fortuitously, the NYT linked to The Art Newspaper and the Van Gogh expert, Martin Bailey’s blog piece which provides relevant and well-informed background to the van Gogh works being offered. My interest is now ignited by Jeune Homme au Bleuet (1890) – The “Young Man with a Cornflower”, has its own particular narrative through place and time, that had “him” as a “her” – Jeune fille au bluet (the mad girl in Zola’s ‘Germinal’) – when it all began …

And when did it begin? Well, according to Virginia Woolf “… on or about December 1910 […is when human character changed]“. And, Van Gogh’s girl/boy was right there at the legendary Autumn 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, curated by Roger Fry, about which Woolf spoke – where more than a word was created that defined a direction, but the visual artistic representation displayed that signaled an end and a beginning. And by the bye inflamed the establishment to various degrees of rage! In 2010, The Burlington Magazine celebrating the centenary of the show, included an interesting piece about the original exhibition catalogue.

Young Man with Cornflower
June 1890

Though I am not adverse to haystacks, nor to cypress and olive trees, this figure I do find captivating. Unlike the stolen haystacks, an image of Jeune Homme au bleuet is in Wikipedia. It’s not at all a good reproduction so I post it here reluctantly – the colors quite wrong; the cornflower is blue, as is the blouse, the hair copper-red, the face pink and lips paler as if masked, the eyes emerald – so I refer you again to the very good Christie’s site; for both the much better visual reproduction and, again, an excellent lot essay.

The gender ambiguity is one aspect, but in these days of fluidity (making ambiguity somewhat obsolete!) I am more taken by the almost carnivalesque nature of the portraiture; reminding me of Pippi Longstocking illustrations and depictions elsewhere – the essay description of “mischievous ragamuffin” seems more than apt.

Lost and Found: A haystack & what a haystack! – Van Gogh (1)

For Sale: $20-30 million (at least!)

Tracking down lost art is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. So every story of success is worthy of note.

Looted, then lost, now finding its way back into the light of day: on November 11th a Vincent van Gogh watercolor on paper, executed in Arles in 1888 and titled Meules de blé, will be auctioned. Should anyone have a spare few tens of millions please inform yourself in a timely fashion on the Christie’s website – as I write “bidding begins in 29 days”!

This all came to my attention today via an article in Zeit Online written by one of Germany’s most prominent commentators on the art market, Stefan Koldehoff, who has written widely on provenance and stolen art. This particular work’s journey out of the nineteenth, through the twentieth century and into this, and across one continent and into another, sounds extraordinary – and it is, but it’s also not; for the stories surrounding the art – makers, buyers, sellers – that got entangled in the horrors of fascism and its aftermath are legendary, and are emblematic of the greater story of war, dispossession and displacement that defined that time.

At the moment I can’t seem to find a good English language report, but I dare say something will turn up – at the latest when a $$$ record is set in New York – money always sells! On the Christie’s site linked to above, the so-called “lot essay” gives some excellent historical background – from the time of execution until now. Quite how this work found its way into the United States remains unclear, but an amicable settlement has been reached between the current owners and the heirs of the two families in whose possession the work was up until its confiscation by the Nazis in occupied Paris in 1941.