by Iain Pears
“So what great accomplishment are we to celebrate?” I asked. “Or have you finally realised my true worth as an artist and come to pay homage?”
“Both and neither,” you replied with a smile. Not quite a grin—you never let yourself go so far—but close enough. “I am going to pull off the biggest explosion in the history of British art. And I need your help.”
And then you laid out what you were going to do. Bring over pictures by Cézanne, Seurat, van Gogh, Degas, mix them in with a few—a select few—English artists who could stand the company, and open the doors.
“With no preparation? No warning? The reviews will be terrible. Atrocious. You won’t sell anything. You’ll be a laughing stock,” I said.
And you laughed again; genuinely this time. “Of course. It will be a catastrophe. If I don’t get the worst notices in history, then I shall be severely disappointed. I even intend to write some of them myself, to be published anonymously. ‘Never in the history of art has such rubbish been offered up to insult the public sensibility. . . .’ That sort of thing. That’s the point, don’t you see?”
“No.”
“Think, man! What have we talked about all these years? About the feebleness of taste in these islands. About how the Good British Public wouldn’t know a masterpiece if it was served up to them for breakfast with eggs and bacon.”
“True enough.”
“And think how everybody agrees with that. Not just you and me and other artists. But everybody. The only universal feature of British art is agreement on how dreadful the public is.”
“Agreed.”
“So what is the point of trying to get good reviews? If people like it, it proves that it is no good. The only way to ensure long-term success is for it to be absolutely detested. That is the test in modern art. Has been since Manet; has been since Whistler sued when he was accused of throwing a paint pot in the public’s face. Which he shouldn’t have done. He should have worn it as a badge of pride. It showed what an old-fashioned man he really was. Artists should no longer seek fame. They must seek notoriety. . . .”
Oh, it was grand. There we were, la vie de Bohème, you skinny as ever and me with a middle-aged paunch beginning to show, getting slowly more drunk, damning the very people whose money we were angling to transfer into our pockets, agreeing on everything. Paris revisited, for the last time. But you were still in control, were you not? I sat on the floor, you occupied the chair, sitting bolt upright, speaking so quietly I had to strain forward to hear you. I drank too much, you maintained your self-control as ever. “If I don’t get the worst reviews . . .” “My pictures . . .” “My show . . .” Where was poor old Cézanne in this? Merely the artisan producing the goods for you to launch your attack with, it seems. And me? Less than that. Would I send some pictures to be included?
“Of course. You can have my portrait of . . .”
“No, no. I will choose. I will choose what best compliments the other ones, if you don’t mind. . . .”
Wonderful. Exhilarating. But. But. The Post-Impressionists weren’t the latest French fashion, were they? Matisse and Picasso were already going beyond them. You pulled the wool over our eyes. Little did we know that things had already moved on. You knew, of course. You knew everything. But all those newfangled doctrines were too much even for you. The limits to your radicalism showed you up as the conservative you really were, and instead you set up as a confidence trickster, selling old goods as new. How pathetic you made us all seem, even as you were shocking us.
And how pathetic you made me seem as well, and all the other English painters who fell into your trap. We thought we were there to derive glory by association, to become identified with the latest in art. But no. That was not the point, was it? It was an exercise in power that you put on; we were there to show how backward English art was. Anyone with advanced tastes would look at what you had brought over from France, and look at what we were doing, and draw their own conclusions. I wondered why you chose those particular paintings of mine. The portrait of the Countess of Albemarle’s gardener; the landscape in Hyde Park. The picture of that ridiculous little dog I painted for your wife. I offered to show you some others, even my dockyard scenes and some of my little whores, but you refused them.
It was a wonderful success. A trumpet blast. Anyone who wanted the latest would have to go to you; you were the gatekeeper of the modern. And if I ever did show my dark pictures, what would have been the result? I would have been congratulated on learning so swiftly from the new art you had brought in. You stole my originality, sir. Reduced me to a cheap imitator of your French friends.
I laughed about it, of course, not least because my pictures were admired and you didn’t manage to unload a single Cézanne. A cheap and pyrrhic victory on my part; the more I sold, the more my reputation would eventually sink. Not that I realised that immediately, of course. It was Mrs. Algernon Roberts who pointed it out to me. No? Not one of your circle? I’m not surprised. She is—or was—a large, amiable woman who rides a horse and has a backside which resembles one. Her husband owns a large part of Suffolk, I believe, and in eight generations the family has read two books. Both about hunting. She gardens, badly, and tries to marry her daughter off to rich men, also with little success. She is also—I must add in the interests of accuracy—a charming and generous woman, kind and gentle. Not your sort at all, as I’m sure you will agree.
Anyway, that evening, your opening. She came along. I don’t know why; someone must have invited her as a joke. She was dressed in her best and looked as though she’d just emerged from a palace ball. She was wandering around looking utterly bewildered by all those pictures you’d hung up—she whose idea of artistic radicalism is Constable—and then saw me. We had met through one of her friends, whom I’d painted a year or so previously. She had arrived in mid-sitting and insisted on watching me at work. I was a bit hard up at the time and thought it might lead to a commission, which it might have, had I not come here. So I let her sit behind me and found her presence oddly congenial. Unlike her friend, who kept on rushing round to see what I was doing and making imbecilic remarks—so much so that I felt like taking off my belt and strapping her to her chair—she sat quietly and watched. “It’s like birthing a horse,” she said cheerfully—and quite appropriately, considering what her friend looked like. “The beast needs all its concentration.”
The remark was so ridiculous it was almost wise; and I took to her, and she to me. I could hardly say we became friends, as we had nothing in common whatsoever, but across that great divide the English language creates to keep people separate, we recognised a certain fellow-feeling. She was the sort of person who would make you a cup of tea and put you up for a month if anything bad ever happened. Reassuring, and I don’t know many people like that.
Anyway, that evening she sailed across the room with a view-halloo when she saw me. “How lovely to see a friendly face,” she said. “Everybody here looks so cross. And your paintings, too. Why, they look as out of place as I feel.”
On the nail. She had an intuitive intelligence far beyond my range. She saw, she commented, and never let any analytical process interfere with the immediacy of her opinions. She was a sort of intellectual Impressionist, if you like, slapping down raw insight with a freshness that was almost unnerving in that overcerebral world. I fear her wisdom was not received with the appreciation that was its due that evening, as the words hit me in the stomach like a punch. All of a sudden I was no longer part of an eager company of progressive painters, part of the new radicalism. I was a stranger in a crowd, whose only human contact was a female equestrian of uncertain age from Suffolk.
I think I was probably quite rude to her; made some dismissive remark, turned away. But she was right; I had spent much of my time assailing the old fogeys of art and suddenly discovered, thanks to you, that I was to be one myself. This was the fate you had laid out for me.
HAVE YOU EVER noticed that no artist has ever committed cold-blooded mur
der? In the whole history of art, go back as far as you can, and no artist has ever been a true killer. Oh, I know, there have been accidents, like Caravaggio stabbing someone in a fight, but that hardly counts. And many kill themselves. But what I mean is deliberate intent, a planned murder. This we do not do. Why is this, do you think? Is it because we are creators, not destroyers? Is it because—as all the world knows who truly understands—that we are really feeble, frightened characters for all our bluster, more keen on being accepted and praised than wreaking vengeance on others?
Whatever the reason, it is true. And think again; what a wonderful defence it would be in a court of law. Suppose I were to push someone off a cliff, and suppose I were clever enough to make sure no-one saw me do it. Suppose, nonetheless, the police built a case against me. Imagine the scene in the courtroom. All the reporters, the jury, the judge, the lawyers, all focussed on the witness box. And me, standing there, grand, disdainful, slightly flamboyant to indicate my bohemianism, but not so much that I antagonise the jury. Dear Lord, the speech I could make! Oscar would have bowed his head in submission to my superiority; Whistler would, for once, have acknowledged one greater than he.
“Do you think that any individual could distract me from my art? Men die; an artist is a creator of the eternal. Do you think we would demean ourselves with the transient?” And so on. You see the strategy? It would not be me, but the whole of art that would be in the dock. A jury might find me guilty; I doubt they would have the temerity to find Cimabue, Raphael, Michelangelo, Gainsborough and Turner guilty as well. They would stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder. One for all and all for one. “Look at my works and see the soul within; could someone whose life is dedicated to the pursuit of Truth and Beauty contemplate the squalid and the violent. . . .” The jurors would take me on trust. You are not the only one capable of exploiting the English sense of inferiority in this regard. Only a painter could use such a strategy and get away with it. If you were a fishmonger you wouldn’t prepare a defence that relied on the fact that few fishmongers have violent tendencies, although for all I know they may be very pacific. But with a painter I believe you could do it, and easily.
Perhaps it is not true, in any case. Perhaps artists kill their fellow men all the time, but do it so well they get away with it. Our humiliation of you over that fake I kept to myself; a murder, I suspect, would be as easily concealed. But, of course, I would have to reveal it eventually, just as I eventually told you about your Gauguin. I would leave an account in my papers, to be read at some stage after my final demise. Not a confession, but a justification, as I would have to be entirely justified in my acts.
But what motive could any painter have for killing? The usual reasons are not good enough. Jealousy, greed, shame; the holy trinity of death. These account for nearly all murders, I think, and pretty trivial they are, when you come to consider them. What about art, though? Could we murder for that? A bad idea, really. Who would we choose? Bad painters? There would be a bloodbath. Stupid patrons? The streets would be littered with corpses. A critic or two? Maybe; there is no love lost between us. A critic is to a painter as a eunuch is to a man, so the saying goes. But that doesn’t stop us running after you, does it? Doesn’t mean we refuse to invite you to our shows. Somebody must do the dirty business, and you have that task. We even accept that you are not there to boost our careers, that your job is to foster art itself, and so can take a bad review—as long as it is not we who get them. As long as the critic is the honest servant of art, we will have to live together.
Anderson did not murder you, even though you destroyed his life, took away his dreams and turned him into an art dealer. He could not; he had no right, and he knew it. Because you spoke the truth, however harshly and malevolently. You were not giving your opinion only. Delphi was sacrosanct to the Greeks, no matter what the oracles said. The priestess communicated the words of Apollo, not her own; she was merely a messenger. So were you with Anderson. It was not your fault he was no good. He could and did hate you for the pleasure you took in it, but not for telling the truth. You had the perfect protection, an inpenetrable suit of armour to ward off any danger. As long as you had that defence, you were invulnerable.
But what if you lost that defence? What if your cruelty and ruthlessness turned into promoting and defending yourself, rather than art? What if you began to destroy good painters and encourage inferior ones for your own advancement only? Would then legions of angry painters beat their way to your door, hammer it down and administer justice? It is impossible to imagine; for who could tell where the lies began?
So, no murders there, at least not yet. A pity, in some ways. It would be a peculiar sensation; one which is no longer respectable, of course, but which all ages before us have venerated as one of the highest human activities. Now only governments kill, and they have become properly efficient at the task. Only politicians know the sensation of taking human life—which, you must admit, is a bad thing for painting as so many subjects involve death or violence. How can one depict it if one has not experienced it? How can one appreciate it if one does not know it at first hand?
WHEN I MAKE all these sniffy remarks about the French, I do not mean to denigrate them, you know. Fine to be French; it is the faux-français that revolt me. Paris was a good time, my liberation. Not as a painter, as I learned next to nothing there and had to spend years getting rid of what I did absorb. But as a man, it was crucial. I went there nervous, shy, uncomfortable, and came back—myself. In all my ostentatious glory, swaggering around the London stage proclaiming myself. I became a character, what the artist should be. It was only a stage show, but worked well enough as that. Some hated me, and thought me fraud or fool, some found me entertaining. But everybody noticed me; and that is the key to success in the world these days. Far more important than actually being good. To impose yourself, to take the public by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking; to scream in its provincial little ear that I am a genius. And if you scream loud enough and long enough, it believes you. Establish that, and in the public mind a good painting becomes a masterpiece, a failure becomes a bold experiment. I saw that in Paris, and learned how to shout.
You watched my transfiguration and guided it; I can remember how it felt, when the penny dropped. It was in a bar, not far from the atelier, and there was a group of us talking. A long day’s work, our eyes still tired from strain, the smell of paint and turpentine hanging over us. Each of us marked by our filthy, blackened fingernails, multicoloured hands. The exuberance of noisy conversation after a hard day, for we were serious, you know. We worked hard eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours a day in summer, learning our craft and trying to equip ourselves for the battles to come, when we had to put it into practise. I can’t remember who was there; Rothenstein for one, I imagine, prim and proper as he always was, making his pursed and always slightly flattening comments, taking the joy out of the occasion by always insisting on thinking about what he said. McAvoy, perhaps, with his disconcerting habit of interjecting a comment that had nothing to do with what we were talking about. Evelyn was certainly not there; she packed her bags at the end of the day and went home. She was always a thing apart, never one of a group. We were drinking and I could not take my drink; my puritan blood was not used to it. A little went a long way, and after two glasses I was roaring drunk while everyone else was still stone cold sober. My tongue loosened, and I said something perfectly absurd; the sort of thing that my normal self would never have dared think, let alone say.
I can’t remember what it was, but I remember the formula: take any major artist and stress a weakness, real or imagined. Build yourself up by diminishing others greater than yourself. The critic’s trick. So what was it? Manet would be a great artist if only he could control his line. Rembrandt’s lack of structure precludes him from being considered a true genius. Raphael’s weakness was that he lacked a Venetian’s sense of colour. Some nonsense like that. And to my surprise I found people nodding, not daring to ma
ke the obvious response that I was talking rubbish. Not because they agreed with me, either; but because I had spoken with such vehemence. I was allowed to say drivel, even encouraged to do so. I had come into my birthright.
I felt ashamed of myself, and even more ashamed of those who didn’t stop me, but it was a touch of power, and out of that moment grew the artist I became. I learned to impose myself, force myself on other people, bully them with my presence and my convictions and, in so doing, convince myself as well. I became a boor and found that people flocked to me, wanting me to do violence to them or, if not that, to be around while I assaulted others.
Except for prissy little Evelyn, of course, who missed my artistic birth in the bar. I took her out one evening, in Paris. She was lonely, and I decided she was ripe for assault. I would attack, overwhelm and achieve a grand victory over her. What was she, after all? I wanted to try out my new persona on an easy target, and she seemed perfect for it. I was even prepared to spend money, although getting others to spend it for me soon became a part of my reputation. It is strange how others feel in your debt if they pay for you in restaurants.
It wasn’t high elegance, though, that evening. We went to a bouillon which I liked because it was the Paris of the people, the sort of place where not even English painters could be found. No tablecloths, waiters even rougher than the clientele, mainly used by people without any means of cooking themselves who ate en pension there, keeping their knives in their own wooden box by the entrance. I frequented many of them, but my favourite was down by Bercy, where you could sit next to the wine men and hear the accents of Burgundy and Bordeaux. The whole place stank of rancid wine and sweat from their clothes, but the food wasn’t bad and the wine was better than you get in many a fine restaurant. No women there at all, ever: this was a place for men to eat.