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Laura Gascoigne

Thank God for books. When shut off from real life, you can see it reflected in novels. But how accurate is the reflection? Does the mirror distort? In month ten of the no-longer-new-abnormal I sat down with a stack of novels about artists. Some I’d read before, others were new, chief among them the fons et origo of the genre, Émile Zola’s L’Oeuvre, first serialised in French in 1885.

At 500 pages Zola’s book is certainly an oeuvre, though not a masterpiece. The 14th novel in his Rougon-Macquart series, it’s the one most closely based on personal experience. His friendship with Paul Cézanne, going back to their schooldays in Aix-en-Provence, gave him an early entrée to the Paris avant-garde; at 26 he came out fighting on behalf of Manet and co in a series of critiques of the Salon of 1866. L’Oeuvre, written 20 years later, represents “the Parisian art world as it really was,” claims Edward Vizetelly, its first translator into English as His Masterpiece. The novel is a roman à clef with composite characters that don’t necessarily fit particular locks. Its doomed painter hero Claude Lantier is a mash-up of Cézanne and Manet, while his best friend the novelist Pierre Sandoz is quite clearly Zola and gets all the best lines, eg: “How can a man be sufficiently wanting in self-doubt as to believe in himself?”

The book is said to have ended their friendship but in fact, apart from the “bluey tinge” of his palette and his lack of social graces, Lantier hardly resembles Cézanne at all. For a start, Zola makes his hero the illegitimate son of a laundress living on a small allowance from a benefactor who recognised his talent. Cézanne’s background was too bourgeois for Zola’s purposes: the son of a provincial banker, his friend lived on a family allowance he was so desperate to keep that he hid the existence of his mistress and son from his father, only marrying in 1886, the year of the old man’s death. No wonder Hortense looks so sour-faced in pictures. The line in the novel Cézanne was least likely to forgive is put into the mouth not of the painter Lantier but the art critic Jory: “And so we waited for my father’s death, and then I married her.”

But I suspect what Cézanne couldn’t stomach was the melodrama. “A fever stiffened him, he worked on with the blind obstinacy of an artist who dives into his entrails to drag therefrom the fruit that tortures him.” Pur-lease! The mix of metaphors alone would be a turn-off for any painter of apples. And Lantier’s obsession with creating a single masterpiece is ridiculous. What Zola gets right, though, is the dedicated artist’s essential selfishness; as Lantier confesses to the equally doomed heroine Christine on day one: “As for me, when it’s a question of painting, I’d kill father and mother you know”. She couldn’t say she wasn’t warned.

Solipsistic selfishness is a constant in the characters of artists in novels. “He is an exceptional man,” Vermeer’s friend van Leeuwenhoek warns the heroine of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. “His eyes are worth a room full of gold. But sometimes he sees the world only as he wants it to be, not as it is. He does not understand the consequences to others of his point of view. He thinks only of his work, not of you.” 

Clutton, the leader of a gang of young English artists on the loose in Paris in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, is a chip off the Lantier monomaniac block: “The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it… One paints for oneself, otherwise one would commit suicide.” Lantier takes that final option, but Maugham’s hero Philip foresees a less dramatic end for Clutton: he saw him “in twenty years, bitter, lonely, savage and unknown; still in Paris … at war with himself and the world, producing little in his increasing passion for a perfection he could not reach: and perhaps sinking at last into drunkenness.” Clutton’s own hero is a chap he met in Brittany who’s just off to Tahiti – a former stockbroker with a wife and family. “‘He chucked it all to become a painter.’ ‘And what about his wife and family?’ asked Philip. ‘Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own account.’ ‘It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.’ ‘Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist… An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse.’”

No prizes for guessing the identity of this ungentlemanly chap. Gauguin had a fascination for Maugham, who returned to him four years later in The Moon and Sixpence, the story of a London stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to go to Paris and become an artist, ending up in Tahiti. Like Lantier’s, his paintings have a strange power. “They seemed to me ugly, but they suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous significance,” is the narrator’s verdict when he first sees them in Paris. Years later in Tahiti he learns from the local doctor of a climactic cycle of paintings burnt on the artist’s orders after his death. “I think Strickland knew it was a masterpiece… He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it.”

What would the real Gauguin would have made of this romantic flim-flam? I suspect he’d have liked it even less than Cézanne liked Zola’s L’Oeuvre. Gauguin had plenty of pride and contempt, but it was not directed at posterity. He was in fact a rare example of an artist sufficiently wanting in self-doubt to believe in himself. For a reality-check on how artists actually think, novelists could do worse than to read his final memoir, Before and After, written on The Marquesas in 1903. Gauguin was no self-destructive Strickland: “I have worked and spent my life well, intelligently, even courageously, without weeping, without tearing things,” he concludes “– and I have very good teeth.” Nor did he treat his family heartlessly, if you believe Émile’s defence of his father in the preface to the first edition. “It is a good story,” Émile dismisses the Gauguin myth. “It is a pity to contradict it, so many credulous souls have been entertained by it. But alas, it is not true.”

Many credulous souls are entertained by novels about artists but alas, they’re not true either. The one exception is The Horse’s Mouth, whose author Joyce Cary, like Maugham’s Philip, studied art in Paris but gave it up when he realised he was third-rate. Cary’s anti-hero Gulley Jimson (illustrated, played by Alec Guinness in Ronald Neame’s 1958 film) has the artist’s essential selfishness and ambition to paint masterpieces, but it’s the practicalities – the getting of materials and walls to paint on – that exercise him. There’s no diving into entrails for torturous fruits. Jimson is a desperado, not a fruitcake.

Of all the novels about art and artists, Cary’s is the only masterpiece. But let’s give the last word to the non-fictional Gauguin: “As you see, everything is serious and ridiculous also. Some weep, others laugh… What is one to do about it? Nothing. All this must be; and, after all, it’s of no consequence. The earth still turns round; everyone defecates; only Zola bothers about it.”

Dick French

A curious little book has just come out called The Death of Francis Bacon. The author, Max Porter, won the International Dylan Thomas Prize some time ago. Whenever awards are deployed I always think of Charlotte Rampling who, in her film The Swimming Pool, remarked: “Awards are like haemorrhoids, sooner or later every arsehole gets one.”

It’s not a very good book. Maybe it was written as a short radio play. However, the author is sound on Bacon’s 20-year decline, which was not so much a decline as a falling off a cliff, about 1970. After that he floundered desperately, grasping at old motifs and habitual tricks, the arrows, the Letraset, the spunk shots … not forgetting the cricket pads. Who could ever?

Fat Vlad in the Sunday Times writes about the 2017 Soutine show at the Courtauld … “The first and only Soutine exhibition in living memory.” Well, I don’t know how old he is but I vividly remember a splendid Soutine show at the Hayward in the early ’80s. It was enormous and completed banished the effect of all that concrete. Vlad makes much of Soutine’s squalor, the bedbugs in the ear, etc.. But Soutine became successful and quite rich, an elegant hombre about town, if always rather nervous and twitchy. He is supposed to have painted just one nude, part of which is illustrated in his little article. It’s so good I can’t believe that it’s his first. There must be more. Don’t believe everything you read in art books.

The Carcass of Beef is said to have been a big influence on abstract expressionism. This is nonsense. In spite of the violence of his approach and the seemingly random application of paint, as you look at it you realise that every brushstroke describes form. Look at the dangling stomach sac in the centre, which at first you don’t notice, shiny and translucent, quite sick-making.

A rather nice book called The Art of Jazz has just come my way. It’s be Alyn Shipton (perhaps he’s Welsh) the chap who says “he…llo” at the start of Jazz Record Requests on the wireless. There are quite a few record covers by Andy Warhol before he became famous. He did them with the aid of an epidiascope before colouring them in.

Photographs, record covers, paintings and drawings from the old Ragtime syncopaters to the present day… Clearly written it’s a pleasure to read, and such a change from art books. Quite a bit on Cab Calloway, always one of my favourites. A photo of him performing in a white zoot suit is outstanding. He was a major figure in the swing era, although Dizzy Gillespie hated him and once stabbed him in the bum on the bandstand. But it was only a playful jab, half an inch or so. Dizzy needed to improvise but Cab made everyone stick to the score.

It’s interesting to read about the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s. Off-duty servicemen would prowl around looking for ‘hep cats’ to beat up. It was a period of relative austerity in the USA and materials were supposed to be used sparingly. The zoot suit guys liked to flaunt their cloth.

There is no mention of Louis Jordan in this book which I find odd. He was a major bandleader of the time who also like to flaunt his cloth. Open the Door Richard is one of the earliest tunes I remember. People used to sing it at me all the time. Stanley Kubrick took some photos of the George Lewis band in New Orleans. They were known as the ‘keepers of the flame’ for revivalist jazz. In one of these pictures he entrusts the camera to a local and sits in on the drums.

And so to the ’60s and London’s New Scene by Lisa Tickner of the Courtauld. I’ve been putting this off because I’m so familiar with the period, and also a little bored with it. But then I never knew much about the financial side of things so I learnt a great deal from this book. Although I’d read Harriet Vyner’s biog Groovy Bob about Robert Fraser I’d forgotten what an arsehole he was. When artists sent him slides he would put them straight in the bin without even looking at them. It was left up to his secretary to rummage them out and send them back with an apologetic letter. Slides were very important in the old days, and very expensive.

It seems that Kasmin started almost be accident. After wandering into Victor Musgrave’s gallery in Soho he met his wife and became her sex slave. Musgrave didn’t mind and paid Kasmin half a crown a day to get on with it. Looking at the photos I can imagine him dressed as a French maid on all fours with a dustpan and brush, or maybe his duties were more exotic/onerous.

Eventually Kasmin webbed up with the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava who put up the money for his gallery. Talk about the “Musgrave Ritual”. Nowadays, Kasmin is a dealer in rugs and oriental knick-knacks, a most accomplished spiv.

What about the art of this era? Revolutionary and vigorous, or thin and forgettable. Edward Lucie-Smith writes: “The public loves artistic virgins, the young artist must in consequence spread his tail, do his little dance, utter a shrill cry, will we look or won’t we? We all know well enough that it is a personality that is on trial, not a collection of works of art.” This is a pretty good evocation of the New Generation exhibitions at the Whitechapel in the mid-’60s. 

I was all in favour of candy-coloured plastic taking the place of brown lamps. Briefly, it was refreshing. But who wants this stuff nowadays. I imagine a lot of it is in store at various museums but there is a house not far from me on Savernake Road by the overhead railway at the bottom of Hampstead Heath (the unfashionable side) and in the front window they proudly display Philip King’s sculpture Tra La La from the ’65 New Generation show (illustrated). I wonder if King ever read Last Exit to Brooklyn. The playful, optimistic mood of his piece suggests not. Tra La La was a poor Brooklyn tart who ends up being used as a human ashtray. I suppose it was important to get away from all the angst and seriousness of the post-war era, but the angst never really goes away in spite of all the cake-topping.

Throughout the period it was important to be part of either the homosexual mafia or the Kosher Nostra, a term coined by Leslie Waddington, himself a Jew. Pollock himself was deeply involved with the Manhattan shirtlifters which led of course to his exaggeratedly butch behaviour. But this is a digression.

The book is interesting until the author gets to the late ’60s with all the protests and sit-ins – the section on Hornsea Art School is tedious in the extreme.