by Zadie Smith
• • •
Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t guess it but you can be the most wonderful aunt, godmother, nursemaid, when the mood takes you. You can spot a baby across a room and make it smile. That’s a skill! Most people don’t even try to develop it! People always telling these put-upon babies what to do, what to think, what to say, what to eat. But you don’t ask anything at all from them—and that’s your secret. You’re one of the few who just likes to make a baby smile. And they love you for it, make no mistake, they adore you, and all things being equal you’d stay longer if you could, you’d stay and play, but you’ve got bills to pay. Matter of fact, downstairs right this moment there’s five or six of these business-minded fellows, some of them you know pretty well, some you don’t, some you never saw before in your life, but they’re all involved in your bills one way or another and they say if you don’t mind too much they’d like to escort you to the club. It’s only ten blocks but they’d like to walk you there. I guess somebody thinks you’re not going to get there at all without all these—now, what would you call them? Chaperones. Guess somebody’s worried. But with or without your chaperones, you’ll get there, you always get there, and you’re always on time, except during those exceptions when exceptional things seem to happen which simply can’t be helped. Anyway, once you open your mouth all is forgiven. You even forgive yourself. Because you are exceptional and so exceptions must be made. And isn’t the point that whenever a lady turns up onstage she’s always right on time?
• • •
Hair takes a while, face takes longer. It’s all work, it’s all a kind of armor. You got skinny a while back and some guys don’t like it, one even told you that you got a face like an Egyptian death mask now. Well, good! You wear it, it’s yours. Big red lips and now this new high ponytail bouncing around—the gardenias are done, the gardenias belonged to Billie—and if somebody asks you where exactly this new long twist of hair comes from you’ll cut your eyes at whoever’s doing the asking and say: “Well, I wear it so I guess it’s mine.” It’s my hair on my goddamn head. It’s arranged just so around my beautiful mask—take a good look! Because you know they’re all looking right at it as you sing, you place it deliberately in the spotlight, your death mask, because you know they can’t help but seek your soul in the face, it’s their instinct to look for it there. You paint the face as protection. You draw the eyebrows, define the lips. It’s the border between them and you. Otherwise everybody in the place would think they had permission to leap right down your throat and eat your heart out.
• • •
People ask: what’s it like standing up there? It’s like eating your own heart out. It’s like there’s nobody out there in the dark at all. All the downtown collectors and the white ladies in their own fancy furs love to talk about your phrasing, that’s the fashion to talk about your phrasing, but what sounds like a revolution to others is simple common sense to you. All respect to Ella, all respect to Sarah, but when those gals open their mouths to sing, well, to you it’s like someone just opened a brand-new Frigidaire. A chill comes over you. And you just can’t do it like that. Won’t. It’s obvious to you that a voice has the same work to do, musically speaking, as the sax or the trumpet or the piano. A voice has got to feel its way in. Who the hell doesn’t know that? Yet somehow these people don’t act like they know it, they always seem surprised. They sit in the dark, drinking Martinis, in their mink, in their tux. People are idiots. You wear pearls and you throw them before swine, more or less. Depends what pearls, though, and what swine. Not everybody, for example, is gonna get “Strange Fruit.” Not every night. They’ve got to be deserving—a word that means a different thing depending on the night. You told somebody once: “I only do it for people who might understand and appreciate it. This is not a June-Moon-Croon-Tune. This song tells a story about pain and heartache.” Three hundred years of heartache! You got to turn each room you play into a kind of church in order to accommodate that much pain. Yet people shout their request from their tables like you’re a goddamn jukebox. People are idiots. You never sing anything after “Strange Fruit,” either. That’s the last song no matter what and sometimes if you’re high and the front row look rich and stupid and dull that’s liable to be your only song. And they’ll be thankful for it! Even though it’s not easy for them to listen to and not easy for you to sing. When you sing it you have been described as punishing, you have been described as relentless. Well, you’re not done with that song till you’re done with it. You will never be done with it. It’ll be done with you first.
• • •
In the end, people don’t want to hear about dogs and babies and feeling your way into a phrase, or eating your heart out—people want to hear about you as you appear in these songs. But they never want to know about the surprise you feel in yourself, the sense of being directed by God, when something in the modulation of your throat leaps up, like a kid reaching for a rising balloon, except most kids miss while you catch it—yes, you catch it almost without expecting to—landing on an incidental note, a perfect addition, one you never put in that phrase before, and never heard anyone else do, and yet you can hear at once that it is perfection. Perfection! It has the sound of something totally inevitable—it’s better than Porter, it’s better than Gershwin—in a moment you have written over their original versions finally and completely . . . No, they never ask you about that. They want the cold, hard facts. They ask dull questions about the songs, about which man goes with which song in your mind, and if they’re a little more serious they might ask about Armstrong or Basie or Lester. If they’re sneaky with no manners they’ll want to know if chasing the drink or the dragon made singing those songs harder or sweeter. They’ll want to know about your run-ins with the federal government of these United States. They’ll want to know if you hated or loved the people in your audience, the people who paid your wages, stole your wages, arrested you once for fraternizing with a white man, jailed you for hooking, jailed you for being, and raided your hospital room, right at the end, as you lay conversing with God. They are always very interested to hear that you don’t read music. Once you almost said—to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring—you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.
ALTE FRAU BY BALTHASAR DENNER
Strange to be writing on painting the day after John Berger died. In fact I was asked to do this a long time ago, I am far past my deadline, but it is only now, the day after Berger died, that I find myself sitting down to write it. Berger was ninety. I would say Balthasar Denner’s Alte Frau is ninety, too, or thereabouts. I never met Berger. This summer I considered a trip, with a mutual friend, to his home in Antony, in the southern suburbs of Paris, but I was staying in the sixth, the city was boiling, the children were with me, and in an example of the kind of wishful thinking that characterizes middle age, I decided there would be another opportunity, another summer. Honestly, I was a little nervous to meet him. What could I say to such a man? What could I offer that wouldn’t fall short? I felt something of what I feel now, before the Alte Frau, or rather before a small postcard reproduction of it. Who am I to speak of this painting? I have her propped up on a little book-chair of violent vermilion. But now, mindful of Berger, I take her off and place her on the dark brown walnut of my kitchen table, and then try her once more against the black card of a document folder. The effect is different each time: she is at her angriest framed by red; resigned and historical against the grain of the wood; an acute memento mori backed by black. But her real context, her true backdrop, is me, the viewer. I chose her after all, from a pile of postcards depicting masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a stack at least six inches high. I passed through many horses and gods and pietàs and angels and landscapes and crucifixions to get to her. I decided in her favor, over greater paintings and more striking ones, only stopping at her, because—as the lay
man has it—she spoke to me. I am a laywoman: that is part of the worry. A casual appreciator of painting, a dilettante novelist, a non-expert—not to mention a woman of lower birth than the personage here depicted. I have always had this uneasiness before paintings. And though I am certainly more confident now than when I was young, I am still the type of person who will tend, if I am in a public gallery, to whisper as I stand in front of the art, the type to frantically consult the catalogue before daring to look up. I don’t trust myself in front of a painting as I do when I open a book. What do I need to know in order to look at this object?
Many years ago, on a trip to the Uffizi with my father, this baleful tendency was thrown into relief by my father’s own more relaxed attitude. He was a great fan of Berger, or rather, he was a great fan of Berger’s 1972 TV show Ways of Seeing, which he referenced throughout my childhood whenever art came up in any context: school permission slips for a gallery visit, a poster advertising the latest Monet blockbuster, a conservative art critic’s column in the Evening Standard: “Well, of course, Berger showed them! He told them what’s what! He turned over the establishment, the Kenneth Clarks and so on. Art’s for everybody—not just the privileged few!” Long before I came across Berger myself I had a childish fondness for him, as the source of my father’s apparent late-life confidence in front of a painting. My father had a way of seeing that was not mine, and our ways clashed as we stood there in the Uffizi, in front of the Venus of Urbino. I was reading about the duke who had commissioned it. My father meanwhile was remarking on how beautiful she was. Not the painting—Venus herself. What an attractive body she had, lithe, with good breasts and nice legs, and so on. I was nineteen, easily excruciated. It seemed to me he was almost aroused by the painting, and I wished, like the little housemaid in the back of that famous picture, for a nearby linen chest to bury my head in. What a bluestocking I was—and how wrong-headed. Surely many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don’t open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you’ve seen her at all?
• • •
I’m not going to make that mistake with the Alte Frau. I am writing about her first and foremost because she is an old woman and therefore a destination point on a journey that lies before me. For I have finished being a young woman. Now I embark upon the process of becoming an old one, a long process, to be sure—I don’t pretend I am very far along in it—but it would be another kind of delusion to imagine I haven’t begun. I choose to bring this reproduction of the Alte Frau into my visual field in the hope that she will speak to me of age through the medium of paint. Paintings, Berger believed, speak to us as elements of a language, a modern language, made possible by their reproduction. We don’t go to them any longer as pilgrims went to icons to see them in their particular sacred context—instead they come to us. And for a generation of non-experts, working-class aesthetes, generalists, TV viewers, anxious gallery-wanderers, Berger offered a long-overdue process of demystification. He urged us to throw aside the school-taught sensations of high-culture anxiety and holy awe. They were to be replaced with a fresh and invigorating mix of skepticism and pleasure. Skepticism toward the false aura of the masterwork (which largely consisted, in his view, of a toxic mix of capital value and sham religiosity). Pleasure at the meaningful channel that can open up—if we are attentive—between the decontextualized painting and our own sensibilities.
What interests me most about the channel between the Alte Frau and myself is how utterly indifferent she is to it. As far as eighteenth-century portraits of women are concerned this is unusual. In Ways of Seeing, Berger argues that portraits of women in the European tradition are constructed around the concept of availability. The Venus of Urbino, for example, offers eternal sexual receptiveness—to the viewer. Everything about her body is arranged in response to our erotic attention. You don’t need to be an art theorist to know this. Any woman looking at it can tell you that no woman has ever lain on a bed like that without being conscious of a gaze: actual, projected or internalized. “Men look at women,” wrote Berger. “Women watch themselves being looked at.” So it is with the Venus of Urbino. She exists to be observed, and what consciousness she has is restricted to consciousness of this. I see you looking at me.
The Alte Frau, on the other hand, seems to me some way past such considerations. For one, she looks resolutely away. No matter how I angle her or move myself in relation to her, I will never catch her eye. Whether I look at her or not appears to be a matter of complete irrelevance, to her. Berger, on Woman: “From earliest childhood, she is told to survey herself continually. Behind every glance is a judgment . . . Those who are judged not beautiful are not beautiful—those who are, are given the prize. The prize is to be owned—that is to say: available.” But the Alte Frau is unavailable. Age has put her outside the bounds of the contest. And perhaps (this painting suggests, to me) it is not so awful to be, once and for all, placed outside of that contest. It is fascinating to learn that when Balthasar Denner showed the Alte Frau to a pair of respected Dutch painters and art critics—Adriaen van der Werff and Karel van Mander—they were so stunned by it they could compare it only to the enigma of the Mona Lisa. Is it possible that what men consider enigmatic in women is actually agency? As in: If she does not want me, what the hell does she want? In room after room at the Louvre we will find painted women receptive to our gaze, applying for it, offering themselves up for judgment, whether it is the judgment of Paris or Cupid or Brian who just this minute got off the Eurostar. But the most famous portrait in the place, the exceptional portrait, is the one of the woman who doesn’t appear to want our gaze or need it or even to know we’re there. The woman who is in her own world, occupied with her own unknowable thoughts, though she is every hour surrounded by iPhone-wielding tourists. The woman who has ceased to be—or never was—concerned with whether or not you are looking at her. The woman with other things on her mind. Who has, precisely, mind! And like that famous enigma, the Alte Frau, too, has mind. Her thoughts are inaccessible, and not to do with us, but you can see they exist. Whatever concerns I may bring to her—I’m forty-one! I’m scared of aging!—it’s clear she’s heard it all before. Lived it, had the children, lost the children, won and lost the men, the women, the world. Nothing new under the sun.
Of course I am reading the Alte Frau through a certain channel of my own creation. I look at her spotted fur and rich silk and see the stubborn commitment to luxury that so many rich women maintain once their flesh has betrayed them, choosing to replace the crumpled, disloyal skin with a new and more glorious surface—fur, silk—which the ruthless logic of capital tells them cannot be devalued as they themselves have been. And I see the great unsexing. The disappearance of gender, over time. To look, in the end, like neither man nor woman. To look only: old. A state that is here neither mourned nor celebrated, only firmly stated, an undeniable destination to which the viewer, too, will travel, if they survive, if they are as firm and resolute as the Alte Frau. I see age without illusion. Wishful thinking, perhaps.
• • •
It happens that Denner showed his Alte Frau to prospective clients as proof of the quality of his work. It was his calling card. When he took it to London, it caused such a sensation that it had a steady stream of rich and influential visitors, including the ambassador of Austria, who persuaded the artist to sell his famous old lady to Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, a deal for which Denner received 5,875 guilders. A simple question occurs: Why? Why was she so popular? It’s a question that does not occur in the case of the Venus of Urbino, nor with the countless other portraits of beauty, grace, sex and feminine vitality that define the European tradition of female portraiture during this period. Easy to imagine how pleasant it must have been for the Duke of Urbino to stand each morning before his Venus and find her still making eyes at him, ever young and available, even as the wife he commissioned it for aged and wrinkled as wives wi
ll tend to do . . . But what did the Holy Roman Emperor—or anyone else—want with a shriveled old woman? It is not like other portraits in its genre. It is not a comforting portrait of a grandmotherly type. Nor is it a heartening symbolic depiction of wisdom, or at least, if she is indeed one of the less deceived, it is not a form of knowledge that appears to have brought with it much peace or satisfaction, as we hope wisdom will. She does not have a peaceful or contented look. That pursed-up little mouth! She is not looking with patient optimism—as with so many portraits of old women—just past the viewer, toward Christ, who awaits her on the other side of the veil that separates life from death. Nor is she a comic grotesque, a warning. No. She simply is. To paint her, it is believed, Denner used a magnifying glass, and it is through this process that he caught every patch of facial fuzz, those wrinkles deep and fine, each spidery broken vein and wisp of white hair. The painting was a boast—of technical expertise, of mastery, and by extension of the superior taste of its owner. My court painter is better than yours. The Alte Frau is the latest thing in portraiture: the King wants it. The human subject may be unappealing but as aesthetic object the painting makes an impressive claim to a new way of seeing: microscopically, scientifically, hyperrealistically, non-symbolically. Just as the old woman has reached a point in her life where she simply is—without explanation, defense, application for pity or even understanding—so the paint itself seems to claim an ultimate thusness. Marveling at the technical achievement, proud of scooping such a masterpiece from under the nose of so many deep-pocketed Englishmen, I imagine Charles VI well pleased with his acquisition. Up until the moment he hangs her. Then he finds himself somewhat unnerved. Who is this old woman on his wall? Who cost him so many guilders and yet makes no attempt to please? Every time he passes she annoys him a little more. Why does she insist on looking past him, and so severely? She who has no interest in or need of him. Unimpressed, unreceptive. Oh, he still talks her up for curious visitors: here is technical mastery, here is a dear old soul prepared to shuffle off her mortal coil and meet her maker, here is a good woman awaiting her heavenly reward. His guests smile and nod but they’re not convinced. Unsettled, they pass on to the next picture. The Alte Frau couldn’t care less. It matters not what any soul who looks at her thinks of her now—you, me, or the Holy Roman Emperor. She is beyond it all. Beyond!