Unacknowledged Legislation by Hitchens Christopher

Author:Hitchens, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

‘Julian did a fabulous picture of a Coke bottle once,’ Tooley said.

‘Who’s Julian?’ I asked absent-mindedly.

‘The boy-friend, of course. I told you. He painted the Coke bright yellow. Fauve,’ she added in a defiant way.

‘He paints, does he?’

‘That’s why he thinks the East’s very important to him. You know, like Tahiti was for Gauguin. He wants to experience the East before he starts on his big project. Let me take the Coke.’

There was less than an hour’s wait at Venice, but the dark was falling when we pulled out and I saw nothing at all – I might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria. Tooley sat with me and drank one of her Cokes. I asked her what her boy-friend’s project was.

‘He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment – say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining room, leek soup in the drawing room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity – do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate – you wouldn’t break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Staël in one room and a Rouault in another.’

The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, ‘Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?’

‘Not Heinz, Campbell’s,’ Tooley said. ‘That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project.’

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell’s are long like English pillar-boxes. I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn’t the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age – only he didn’t call it that. He said it was the Art of the Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn’t have been any use at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.’1

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