The Pen and the Brush by Anka Muhlstein

Author:Anka Muhlstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

EDOUARD MANET The Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe) 1862–63 Credit 6

Zola’s descriptions of the art market are not always fully realistic. There are two dealers in The Masterpiece, Malgras and Naudet. Malgras is an old-style dealer and could be a Balzac character. (Balzac’s dealer, Elie Magus, has greater stature and ambition, but he too keeps a low profile.) Malgras, “a fat man wrapped in a very dirty, green frock coat which made him look like an untidy coachman…was, under that thick layer of grime, a highly perceptive fellow who had taste and a nose for good painting…he instinctively homed in on creative artists who were still disputed,…he could see they had a great future well before anyone else…Coupled with this, he was a fierce negotiator [but] settled for an honest profit of twenty or thirty percent.”21

When Malgras retires, he has only a very modest degree of comfort, but it is enough for him. There is nothing discreet, though, about Zola’s other dealer, Naudet, “with a gentleman’s trappings, his fancy morning coat, the glittering gem on his cravat pin, pomaded, polished, varnished…, living the high life, a broker who was radically unimpressed by good painting…he could tell which artist was worth launching, not the one who promised the debatable genius of a great painter.”22 And that is how he changed the rules of the game: he did not aim to sell to connoisseurs with any taste, just rich gamblers “who bought paintings as they would stocks and shares, out of vanity or in the hope their share price would go up.” Naudet artificially raises prices and tumbles into disaster in the end; Zola’s depiction of his speculating foreshadowed the dangerous machinations that would turn the art world upside down. Zola was probably thinking of Georges Petit, Durand-Ruel’s great rival. All the same, the portrayal seems a little unfair to dealers of his day: Durand-Ruel took considerable financial risks to exhibit the Impressionists, and another dealer, Vollard, supported and encouraged Cézanne long before he organized a major exhibition of his work.

Zola felt it more important to give his painters psychological nuance than to adhere to an absolute, objective reality. He shows us Claude distraught after a visit from Malgras, even though the dealer buys one of his sketches; and we see Bongrand vehemently refusing to sell to Naudet, saying that it would be paralyzing for him to “have a dealer on his back.” That the relationship between an artist and a dealer may be strained, we can readily accept; it seems unlikely, though, that a painter would refuse to sell. But Zola was bound to the truth of his characters, and, like Proust, he could have argued that he frequently did only what they dictated. This is because Zola’s imagination took over when he created his characters, although readers struggle to accept that this was the case, preferring to identify Claude with Cézanne lock, stock, and barrel. The question of whom Claude’s character was based on gave rise to

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