The Unknown Masterpiece

by Honoré de Balzac

  I want to respond to this in a moment, but I must first point out a third history, interwoven with the other two, as it is in Balzac’s story. In this history, there are certain parallels between looking at a picture and looking at a woman—particularly at a woman’s nakedness if one happens to be a man. There are traditions in which it is regarded as dangerous, or even lethal, for a man to see a woman’s genital area. But that aura extends, in certain cultures, to all parts of a woman’s body, which must be veiled to protect her from the gaze of males—and males from the sight of unveiled women! Balzac allows us to infer that in Frenhofer’s painting, his mistress, Catherine Lescault—who is further described in all but the final version of the story as the courtesan known as La Belle noiseuse[6]—is depicted naked. The artist’s extreme reluctance to allow anyone to look at his painting must mean that she is shown nude, so that seeing the picture is equivalent to seeing Catherine herself naked. Even in fairly recent memory, when nude photographs of the singer Madonna were printed in Playboy, it was at first felt that this must be an extreme embarrassment to her and, at the very least, an invasion of her privacy. There are real-life scenarios in which possessing nude photographs of a woman would give someone the power to blackmail her.

  Frenhofer will finally permit his painting to be viewed only because this is the price he has to pay for being able to complete it. He evidently cannot complete it until he finds the right model: “I’ve made up my mind to travel—I’m off to Greece, to Turkey, even Asia, to look for a model.” One wonders what has happened to the original model, Catherine Lescault herself. Perhaps she is no longer as beautiful as she once was, which is what happens to the model in Henry James’s later story “The Madonna of the Future,” in which the painter waits for too many years to execute his great painting.[7] In fact, I believe there is a more natural explanation, but in any case Porbus tells him that Poussin’s mistress, Gillette, is of an incomparable beauty. And he tempts the old painter with an irresistible bargain: in exchange for allowing him to use Gillette as the needed model, he must permit Poussin and himself to see La Belle noiseuse. There is thus a symbolic exchange of women. Poussin and Porbus are allowed to see Catherine Lescault, in exchange for Frenhofer being allowed to see Gillette naked. Since Gillette is required to strip, we know that Catherine herself is naked in Frenhofer’s painting, which explains why Frenhofer kept his painting of her veiled.

  In terms of their values, both men have made an immense sacrifice for the sake of art. It is as if only something of a magic potency as great as that possessed by women (or at least by beautiful women) is sufficient to transfigure a picture into reality. Small wonder feminists have found reason to question the Male Gaze! Small wonder Gillette (as if posing for a canvas by Delacroix) “stood before him in the innocent posture of a terrified Circassian girl carried off by brigands to some slave dealer.” How desperately Mary needed to be in Jerusalem, in the scene depicted by Porbus, can be measured by the fact that the boatman is given the inestimable privilege of seeing her bared breasts. Small wonder Frenhofer’s main criticism of Porbus’s picture is that “everything’s wrong” in the way in which he painted Mary’s bosom: the painting of the breasts should be as compelling as the breasts themselves.

  From the story’s perspective, of course, the gaze does not make objects of women, as feminist theory insists. Rather, the story regards the bare female body as of so high a potency that it verges on numinousness. It is to be seen only by a man who occupies the position of the bridegroom. If it should be seen by anyone else, it loses its tremendous value entirely. The woman is cheapened beyond recovery. This is why modesty was once so exalted a feminine virtue. This is something Gillette completely understands. She has no choice but to hate her lover for having allowed this to happen: “Kill me! I’d be vile to love you still—you fill me with contempt.”[8] Notice that we are still talking about visual perception: there is no question of Frenhofer having made love to Gillette, and, needless to say, no question of carnal congress between the two other artists and the portrait of Catherine Lescault! The symbolic equivalence the story establishes between seeing a woman’s exposed body and seeing a work of art is an effort on the part of a Romantic writer to find something as valuable as art itself—something that money cannot buy, for a woman’s nakedness is without value if it is bought. We get, in brief, a value scheme in which a kind of Taliban attitude toward female flesh is rendered equivalent to a Romantic’s adoration of art as the supreme value of life.

  The sequestration of women behind veils is of a piece with the hiddenness of art Walter Benjamin appeals to in order to account for art’s aura. The publicity of the museum, in which everything is there to be looked at, is like the parade of women at the Folies Bergères, their nakedness stripped of its awesomeness. What makes Frenhofer so difficult for us to understand is that he fuses the mystery of female flesh with the magic of the work of art. But this fusion works only if it is a portrait of a woman the artist actually loves, whether or not it actually shows her naked. The story could hardly have worked had Frenhofer been painting fruit all that time like Cézanne! Given the intensity of the fused entity, it is hardly matter for amazement that the picture cannot live up to expectations. Of course the two other artists see, relative to what they have been led to expect, nothing. If all it is is a painting—a mere painting—well, it might just as well be what the mere human eye makes out: “a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint” with an incongruously “living foot...[which] appeared there like the torso of some Parian Venus rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes.”[9] If painting has lost its promise, artists have lost their power—so what’s the point of art? And what’s the point of going on painting if the best you can hope for is merely to make pictures?

  That may be good enough for Poussin, who at the end of life could say, complacently, “Je n’ai rien négligé”—“I have neglected nothing.” It had to be enough for Porbus, who was after all the favorite painter of a woman to whom he presumably would not have been united otherwise than as an external portraitist. It was not enough for Frenhofer, whose vision of art was as mystical as that of Balzac. It was not unless solving the problems of painting—which he had done—was the means to securing the mythic promise of painting, at which he necessarily failed: the transformation of a painted woman into a real one. In my view that failure explains why he burned all his paintings and then died. And it explains, I think, why Catherine Lescault was unavailable to him as a model. She was dead, and the only way she could be returned to life was through painting. He could not finish the painting since he could not re-create life. He saw what he had achieved as of a very different order of failure than what Poussin and Porbus saw. As an afterthought, one might conjecture that when it was widely seen that Frenhofer’s failure was inescapable, due to an inherent limitation on realism, Modernism was ready to begin. Indeed, it is irresistible to see that wall of paint, crisscrossed with lines and with the realistic fragment of a woman’s foot, as the first truly Modernist work!

  But in what sense is La Belle noiseuse—which we may as well consider the work’s title—a masterpiece? And in what sense is it unknown? It could not have been known, in 1612, as a Modernist masterpiece. The concept did not exist. Neither, for that matter, did the concept of Mannerism exist. Both of these were stylistic terms, devised by art historians in the twentieth century, to designate bodies of work with certain affinities to one another. Modernism is sometimes thought to have begun with Manet, and Manet is a good case to consider here, since his work was radically misperceived in its time, and his masterpiece, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, relegated to the Salon des refusés, where it was jeered at by an outraged public. It was an “unknown masterpiece” in the sense that, though a masterpiece, few at the time would have recognized it as such. Ruskin wrote: “I am fond of standing by a bright Turner in the Academy, to listen to the unintentional compliments of the crowd—‘What a glaring thing!’ ‘I declare I can’t look at it!’ ‘Don’t it
hurt your eyes!’” I myself once overheard someone scoffing at the Turners in the Tate, saying, “Whoever told him he could paint?” Turner’s works are still not seen by everyone as the masterpieces they are. In the context of Balzac’s story, the term inconnu means “unrecognized.”

  It might seem difficult to suppose that painters as gifted as Poussin and Porbus could fail to recognize a masterpiece when they see one, but that is the story of art. In 1612, Poussin’s paradigm was the School of Fontainebleau. For Pourbus, Titian set the criterion for painterly excellence. Imagine that they had been presented with one of Cézanne’s masterpieces, or de Kooning’s Woman I, or Pollock’s Blue Poles. Nothing in their experience would have prepared them to see these as art at all. They would have looked to them like ruined canvas, smeared over by a madman or an animal. Frenhofer himself could hardly have recognized La Belle noiseuse as a masterpiece. We would want to reverse his speech, saying to him, “You’re in the presence of a painting. But you’re still looking for a woman.” It would have been of no interest to him whatever to learn that he was ahead of his time, “The First Modernist.” He is not interested in art history. He is interested in the power of images to come to life. Even if it is a great painting, it has, from the perspective of magic, to be a bleak failure.

  Under the auspices of Balzac’s Romanticism, a great work of art was equivalent in value to the body of a beloved woman. And if no one could see its greatness, that is what one must expect. Greatness in art is disclosed in time, as the body of the woman is revealed to the rightful eye of love.

  —ARTHUR C. DANTO

  [1] In Balzac’s novel, of course, it is the studio of the painter François Porbus; Frenhofer’s is “near the Pont St. Michel,” a few streets away, near where Matisse, himself an admirer of Frenhofer, was to have a studio on the Quai St. Michel through the 1920s. Picasso executed a suite of etchings based on Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu in 1927 for the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who published them in 1931 to mark the centenary of the novel. His own masterpiece, Guernica, was painted in the rue des Grands-Augustins.

  [2] In an interview with J. Gasquet, Cézanne makes the same identification, somewhat less emotively. He describes the way his eyes remain so attached to the painting he is working on that it feels as if they might bleed. “Am I not somewhat crazy? Fixated on my painting [like] Frenhofer?”

  [3] In order to avoid confusion, I shall use “Pourbus” to refer to the actual painter, and “Porbus” to refer to Balzac’s somewhat fictionalized character based on Pourbus.

  [4] In a kind of graphic footnote to Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu—Plate 36 of the so-called Vollard Suite of 1934—Picasso depicts what we may suppose is Frenhofer as Rembrandt. He showed the print to his mistress, Françoise Gilot, who lived with him in the rue des Grands-Augustins. Gilot recalls him saying, “You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and moustache? That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe Balzac; I’m not sure.” Picasso was considerably older than Gilot, and very mindful of the disparity in age. What is striking is that Frenhofer-Rembrandt-Balzac-Picasso is evidently turned into a painting. He holds palette and brushes with one hand, and with the other he reaches out of the picture to hold hands with his young and achingly beautiful model. Artist and woman thus change places: in Balzac’s story, the woman is in the picture and the artist is outside it; in Picasso’s print, the painter is in the picture and the woman is outside. But they retain the kind of physical contact Frenhofer—and perhaps Balzac and Picasso—dreamt of. Though still a lover, Frenhofer may be too old for any more strenuous contact than holding hands, the way “Freno” in the film La Belle noiseuse—based on Balzac’s story—lies chastely beside his mistress, holding hands, when the artistic-erotic renewal he had hoped for fails to materialize.

  [5] The Realist painter, Gustav Courbet, is reported to have said, regarding the figure of Olympia in Manet’s eponymous painting, “It’s flat, it isn’t modeled; it’s like the Queen of Hearts after a bath.” I had always taken this as a singular witticism, but Frenhofer’s speech—written by Balzac nearly three decades before Manet’s controversial work was painted—makes me believe that it must have been a standard put-down in studio crits at the time. Had Porbus not felt such great veneration for Frenhofer, he might have responded as Manet himself did: “Courbet bores us in the end with his modeling: his ideal is a billiard ball.”

  [6] The name translates roughly into “The Beautiful Pain in the Ass.” Intuitively, it sounds like someone’s real nickname, and I could not help but feel that Catherine Lescault was a historical person. In the film La Belle noiseuse, the modern-day Frenhofer mentions a book about her. So far as I have been able to determine, however, she is entirely fictional, nickname and all. Richard Howard’s translation follows Balzac’s final version of Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu by omitting the name La Belle noiseuse.

  [7] James’s story is sometimes said to be based on Balzac’s. Since in none of the five essays he wrote on Balzac does he mention, let alone discuss, the Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, one is almost obliged to believe that he was somehow suppressing the influence. At least certain current views of literary influence would say that Balzac’s story must be what James’s is about!

  [8] When Fernande Olivier moved in with Picasso in 1905, he demanded that she stop modeling. He even sought to lock her up when he was away from the studio.

  [9]The celebrated “wall of paint”—une muraille de peinture—which Poussin sees instead of the “woman lying on a velvet coverlet, her bed surrounded by draperies, and at her side a golden tripod exhaling incense” he had expected from Frenhofer’s exultant description of his masterpiece, was not a thinkable misadventure in seventeenth-century studio practice. “Paints were expensive in those days,” Balzac correctly observes, even for an artist as rich as Frenhofer. Only in the twentieth century, with Monet’s Water Lilies or the Abstract Expressionist canvases of Pollock or de Kooning, could a painting have been botched through that kind of material excess. In Balzac’s day, artists’ pigments were available in relatively inexpensive tubes, and this made possible the direct approach to painting that Romanticism required. When Frenhofer complains about the pigments in Porbus’s studio, he is speaking like someone who takes the art supply store as a given.

  THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE

  TO A LORD

  1845.

  1. Gillette

  On a cold December morning of the year 1612, a young man whose clothes looked threadbare was walking back and forth in front of a house in the rue des Grands-Augustins, in Paris. After pacing this street for some time as irresolutely as a lover shy about keeping a tryst with his first mistress, however obliging she may be, he finally crossed the threshold and inquired if Maître François Porbus was at home. Receiving an affirmative answer from an old woman sweeping the entrance hall, the young man slowly mounted the spiral staircase, stopping on each step like a new courtier uncertain of the king’s reception. At the top, he stood on the landing another moment, hesitating to lift the grotesque knocker which embellished the door of the studio where Henri IV’s court painter, to whom Marie de Médicis now preferred Rubens, was doubtless at work. The young man was experiencing that profound emotion which has stirred the hearts of all great artists when, in the prime of youth and their love of art, they approach a man of genius or stand in the presence of a masterpiece. There is a first bloom in all human feelings, the result of a noble enthusiasm which gradually fades till happiness is no more than a memory, glory a lie. Among such fragile sentiments, none so resembles love as the youthful passion of an artist first suffering that delicious torture which will be his destiny of glory and of woe, a passion brimming with boldness and fear, vague hopes and inevitable frustrations. The youth who, short of cash but long on talent, fails to tremble upon first encountering a master, must always lack at least one heartstring, some sensitivity in his brushstroke, a certain poetic expressiveness. There may be conceited boasters prematurely convinced that the future is theirs, but only fools believe
them. In this regard, the young stranger seemed to possess true merit, if talent is to be measured by that initial shyness and that indefinable humility which a man destined for glory is likely to lose in the exercise of his art, as a pretty woman loses hers in the stratagems of coquetry. The habit of triumph diminishes doubt, and humility may be a kind of doubt.

  Beset by poverty and amazed at this moment by his own presumption, the poor neophyte would never have entered the studio of the painter, to whom we owe the admirable portrait of Henri IV, had it not been for an extraordinary favor granted by chance. An old man was coming up the stairs behind him; from the strangeness of this person’s garments, the splendor of his lace neckwear, and the awe-inspiring confidence of his gait, the youth assumed him to be either the painter’s friend or his patron. He moved aside on the landing and studied the man attentively as he passed, hoping to recognize an artist’s good nature or an art lover’s obliging disposition; but perceived instead something diabolical in the man, that je ne sais quoi so attractive to artists. Imagine a bulging forehead sloping down to a tiny squashed turned-up nose like Rabelais’s or Socrates’; smiling wrinkled lips, a short chin held high and adorned with a gray beard trimmed to a point; sea-green eyes apparently dimmed by age, yet which, by the pupils’ contrast with the pearly whites they floated in, must have cast compelling glances in the throes of anger or enthusiasm. Moreover the entire countenance was singularly wizened by the debilities of age and still more by those thoughts which exhaust body and soul alike. No lashes remained on the eyelids, and above the deep sockets only tufts of eyebrows were to be seen. Set such a head upon a weak and puny body, swathe it in extravagant curlicues of immaculate lace, drape a heavy gold chain over the black doublet beneath, and you will have an imperfect image of this personage to whom the dim light of the staircase lent a further tinge of the fantastic: as if a canvas by Rembrandt were walking, silent and unframed, through the tenebrous atmosphere that great painter has made his own. The old creature gave the youth a glance of great sagacity, knocked three times on the door, and said to the sickly looking man of about forty who came to open it: “Good day, maître.”