Paris Still Life by Rosalind Brackenbury

Author:Rosalind Brackenbury [Brackenbury, Rosalind]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477809006
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2017-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

11.

I stood in Françoise’s bedroom and stared. It was small, the painting, smaller than I had imagined, and it was a copy or a twin of the one we had seen together in that exhibition in the Guggenheim. It was a tiny still life of walnuts, on a gray-blue cloth folded into ridges. The nuts were scattered as if a squirrel had left them, and what had fascinated the painter, I could see, was the way the whorls and ridges on them could be translated by paint. There was a silver nutcracker like a pair of bandy legs. The cloth was a real, rucked-up tablecloth, and the walnuts were knobbly and looked hard to crack. The light that fell on them came in from the left, as if they had been abandoned after a meal in an adjacent room. There was one nut that had been split open. I came in close, examined the slightly crazed surface of the paint. The kernel that had fallen from the open nut lay in two pieces only just joined together, like the human brain. I remembered how my father had peered at the little painting on the wall at the Guggenheim, one still life among others, pots, jugs, apples, kitchen implements, even leeks and carrots, all the ordinary things of life made to glow in the light the painters had seen. Still life, a celebration of the ordinary. Las Bodigones, the exhibition was called. It had been organized by topic, rather than in historical sequence, so the artists were all jumbled together as if what they had painted mattered more in the end than who they were. A Cézanne study of apples next to a Dutch seventeenth-century pot, a Cubist fruit bowl beside an Italian Renaissance heap of root vegetables. I had been brought up to respect the order of art history, to recognize painters by their connection with each other—Rembrandt, Ruysdael, Pieter de Hooch all knowing each other, the Impressionists lending each other money to buy paint as they lived together in Montmartre, Picasso and Braque bound together by their era and their friends and what was going on around them. Both my father and the Courtauld had taught me that historical period mattered, made art coherent. Shocked, I saw a new way of presenting things, and I remember commenting on it to my father. He’d said, “This is how they have organized the Tate Modern, you know. It’s the new fad. I’m not sure I approve. But it does allow you to concentrate on the paintings themselves.”

I saw him move from painting to painting with the absorbed attention of his profession. He was pretending not to care about provenance, influence, all the things I knew were at the heart of his work. You had to know these things, to know whether a painting was real or a fake. The brushstrokes, the signature were visible on the surface, but what lay underneath, the history beneath the paint and varnish, that was where the clues lay.

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