The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  “You might put it that way.”

  “I am putting it that way.”

  “Would you like to hear about Jacques Debierue?”

  “I’d love to hear about Jacques Debierue!”

  “In that case, I’ll begin without the overall frame of reference and fill in the necessary background as I come to it. I said, I’ll begin without the—I see, you don’t have any relevant questions and you’ve decided to remain silent until you do? Fine. You’ll understand my exhilaration about my opportunity to meet Jacques Debierue, then, when I tell you that I’ve read all, as far as I know, that’s been written about him. The scope is wide, but the viewpoint is narrow.

  “Only four other critics, all Europeans, have actually seen and written about his work at firsthand. I’ll be the first American critic to examine his work, and it’ll be new, original painting that no one else has ever seen before. For the first time in my critical career, I’ll see the most recent Nihilistic Surrealistic paintings by the most famous artist in the world. It will also be possible, afterward, for me to evaluate and compare my opinions with the critiques of those critics who’ve written about his earlier work. I’ll have a broad view of Debierue’s growth—or possible retrogression—and historical support, or better yet, nonsupport, for my convictions.

  “The incidental factors that led to Debierue’s fame during the course of contemporary art history are marvelous. His silent, uphill fight against improbable odds appears, on the surface, to be effortless, but such was not the case. Mass hostility is always omnipresent toward the new, especially in art. Hundreds of books, as you know, have been filled with exegetical opinions about the Impressionists, Expressionists, Suprematists, Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists of the early years of this century. All of the major innovators have been examined in detail, but there were many other painters who received no recognition at all. And there were smaller movements that were formed and then dissolved without being mentioned. How many, no one knows.

  “But it was these minor movements that I was interested in during my year in Europe. It was a way to earn a reputation, you see. And if I could’ve pinned one of them down, one that got away, a movement that I could’ve written about and established as an important but overlooked movement in art history, I could’ve started my critical career immediately instead of teaching art survey courses to bored accountants at CCNY.

  “Paris seethed with new developments in art before, during, and after the First World War. Hardly a day passed without a new group being formed, a new manifesto being drafted, followed by polemics, fistfights, dissolvements.

  “Three painters would meet in a café, argue affably among themselves until midnight, and decide to form their own little splinter group. Then, as wine and arguments flowed for the remainder of the night as they scribbled away at a new manifesto, they detested each other by dawn.

  “White-faced with anger and lack of sleep, they’d march off to their studios in the nacreous light of morning, their new movement junked before it was begun.

  “A few of these lesser movements caught on, however, lasting for a few days or weeks after a scattered flurry of press publicity, but most of them died unheralded, unnoticed, for want of a second—or for no discernible reason. The fortunate, well-publicized movements lasted long enough to influence enough imitators to gain solid niches in art history. Cubism, for example, a term that pleased the reading public, was one of them.

  “Paris, of course, was the center of the vortex during the early twenties, but forays into new and exciting art expressions were by no means confined to France.

  “During my single year in France, as I tried to track down tangible evidence of these minor movements without success, my side trips to Brussels and Germany were even more tantalizing.

  “In Brussels, the Grimm Brothers, Hal and Hans, who called themselves ‘The Grimmists,’ spent months in dark mines collecting expressive lumps of coal. These were exhibited as ‘natural’ sculptures on white satin pillows. Within two days, however, shivering Belgians had pilfered these exposed lumps of coal, and the exhibit closed. The Belgians are a practical people, and 1919 was a cold winter. In their own way, the Brothers Grimm had originated ‘Found’ art—”

  “James—when you say that you have no superego, or conscience, does that mean that you’ve never done anything bad, anything you’ve ever been sorry for, later?”

  “Yeah. Once. There was an assistant professor I knew at Columbia, an anthropologist, whose wife died. He had her cremated, and bought a beautiful five-hundred-dollar urn to keep her ashes in. He used to keep the urn on his desk at home, as a memento mori. Anthropologists, as you know, are pretty keen on ritual, burial ceremonies, and pottery—things of that nature. His wife died of tuberculosis.

  “I never knew his first wife, but I met his second wife, who was one of his graduate students. Men, like women, are usually attracted to the same type of person when they remarry—”

  “That isn’t true! I’ve never known anyone like you before—”

  “But then you’ve never been married, Berenice. And I’m talking about a widower who married again. His name doesn’t matter to you, but it happened to be Dr. Hank Goldhagen. Anyway, his second wife, Claire, was also susceptible to respiratory infections. Sometimes, when they got into an argument, Hank would point to the urn of ashes, and say, ‘My first wife, in that urn, is a better woman and a better wife to me than you are, right now!’”

  “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “Isn’t it? I sometimes wonder what she said to him to provoke it. But the marriage didn’t last long. Following a weekend skiing trip to New Hampshire, Claire developed lumbar pneumonia and died. To save Hank money, I advised him to put Claire’s ashes in the same expensive urn with his first wife.”

  “But why . . . ?”

  “There was ample room in the urn, and why not? Did it make any sense to buy a second expensive urn? And if he bought a cheaper one, that would’ve indicated to his friends that he thought less of Claire than he did of his first wife. But my practical suggestion backfired. Hank got so he was staring at the urn all the time brooding over and about the mixed ashes of these two women, and eventually he cracked up. And because it was my fault, I felt bad about it for weeks.”

  “That isn’t a true story, is it? Is it, James?”

  “No, it isn’t a true story. I made it up to please you, because, it seems, you’re a little old lady who likes stories.”

  “No, I’m not—and I don’t like stories like that!”

  “I’m leading up to Debierue, and I promise you that it’s much more interesting than the story of Dr. Goldhagen’s two wives.”

  “I’m sorry I interrupted, James. May I pour you another cup of coffee?”

  “Please. Let me tell you first about the Scatölögieschul that was formed by Willy Büttner in Berlin, during the post-war years of German political art. The Scatölögieschul probably holds the European record for short-livedness. It opened and closed in eight minutes flat. Herr Büttner and his three defiant fellow exhibitors, together with their cretin model—who denied her obvious presence in every painting—were carted off to jail. The paintings were confiscated, never to be seen by the public again. According to rumor, these ostensibly pornographic paintings wound up in General Goering’s private collection. They’re now believed to be in Russia, but no one really knows. I couldn’t find a single eyewitness who had seen the pictures, although a lot of people knew about the exhibit. This was another frustrating experience for me in Europe.

  “By the early sixties the trail was too cold for valid, documentary evidence. I was too late. The European Depression and World War Two had destroyed the evidence. I still feel that the critical neglect of these so-called minor movements may prove to be an incalculable loss to art history. Then, as now, critics only choose a very small number of painters to be the representatives of their times. And we only remember the names of those who come in first. Any sports writer can r
ecall that Jesse Owens was the fastest runner in the 1936 Olympics, but he won’t remember the names of the second and third place runners who were only split seconds behind him.

  “Therefore, it’s almost miraculous that Jacques Debierue was noticed at all. When you think about the peculiar mixture of hope and disillusionment of the twenties, he seems to be the most unlikely candidate of all the artists of the time to be singled out for fame. And he was studiedly indifferent to the press.

  “One painter, a true archetype, can hardly be said to constitute a movement, but Debierue rose above the Parisian art world like an extended middle finger. Paris critics found it embarrassing to admit that none of them knew the exact date his one-man show opened. The known details of the discovery of Debierue, and the impact of his influence on other painters, has been examined at some length by August Hauptmann in his monograph entitled Debierue. This isn’t a long book, not for the work of a German scholar, but it’s a well-documented study of Debierue’s original achievement.

  “There isn’t any mass of published work on Debierue, as there is on Pablo Picasso, but Debierue’s name crops up all the time in the biographies and autobiographies of other famous modern painters—usually in strange circumstances. The frequent mention of his name isn’t surprising. Before Debierue was in the art world, he was of it. Because he framed their paintings, he knew personally, and well, most of the other firsts of the war and postwar years.”

  “He was a picture framer?”

  “At first, yes. Miró, De Chirico, Man Ray, Pierre Roy, and many other painters found it expedient to visit him in his tiny framing shop. He gave them credit, and until they started to make money with their work, they sorely needed credit. Debierue’s name is brought up in the studies published on every important postwar development because he was there—and because he knew all the artists involved. But his only commonality with other innovators is the fact that he was a first in his own right as the acknowledged father of Nihilistic Surrealism. Debierue, by the way, didn’t coin this term for his work.

  “The Swiss essayist and art critic, Franz Moricand, was the first writer to use this term with reference to Debierue’s art. And the label, once attached, stuck. The term appeared originally in Moricand’s essay, “Stellt er nur?” in Mercure de France. The article wasn’t penetrating, but other critics were quick to snatch the term ‘Nihilistic Surrealism’ from the essay. An apt and descriptive bridge was needed, you see, to provide a clear dividing line between Dada and Surrealism. Both groups have attempted at various times to claim Debierue, but he was never in either camp. Dada and Surrealism both have strong philosophical underpinnings, but no one knows what Debierue’s leanings are.

  “Chance is an important factor in the discovery and recognition of every artist, but what many modern critics fail to accept is that Debierue’s many artist-friends paid off by sending people to see Debierue’s one-man show. In his Montmartre hole-in-the-wall framing workshop he had mounted many paintings at cost, and others absolutely free, for poor young painters whose work sold a few months later for high prices. Those ‘crazy boatloads’ of Americans, as Fitzgerald called them, coming to France during the boom period, always carried more than fifty dollars in cash on their person. They bought a lot of paintings, and the selling painters didn’t forget their obligations to Debierue.

  “Despite Hauptmann’s book, an aura of mystery about Debierue’s first and only one-man show remains. No invitations were issued, and there were no posters or newspaper ads. He didn’t even mention the show to his friends. One day, and the exact date is still unknown, a small, hand-lettered card appeared in the display case behind the street window of his framing shop. ‘Jacques Debierue. No. One. Shown by request only.’ It was spelled Capital N-o-period. Capital O-n-e.”

  “Why didn’t he use the French Nombre une?”

  “That’s a good point, Berenice. But no one really knows. The fact that he used the English No. One instead of Nombre une may or may not’ve influenced Samuel Beckett to write in French instead of English, as the literary critic Leon Mindlin has claimed. But everyone concerned agrees that it was an astute move on Debierue’s part when American tourists, with their limited French, began to arrive on the Paris scene. Using a number as a title for his picture, incidentally, was another first in art that has been indisputably credited to Debierue. Rothko, who uses numbers exclusively for his paintings, has admitted privately, if not in writing, his indebtedness to Debierue. The point’s important because several art historians falsely attribute the numbering of paintings as a first for Rothko. Debierue hasn’t said anything, one way or another, about the matter. He’s never commented on his picture, either.

  “This much is certain. No. One postdated Dada and predated Surrealism, thereby providing a one-man bridge between the two major art movements of this century. And Debierue’s Nihilistic Surrealism may, in time, turn out to be the most important movement of the three. In retrospect, it’s easy enough for us to see how Debierue captured the hearts and minds of the remaining Dadaists who were gradually, one by one, dropping out of Dada and losing their hard-earned recognition to the burgeoning Surrealists. And you can also realize, now, why the Surrealists were so anxious to claim Debierue. But Debierue stood alone. He neither admitted nor denied membership in either movement. His work spoke for him, as a work of art is supposed to do.

  “No. One was exhibited in a small and otherwise empty room—once a maid’s bedroom—one short flight of stairs above Debierue’s downstairs workshop. An environment had been created deliberately for the picture. The visitor who requested to see it—no fee was asked—was escorted upstairs by the artist himself and left alone with the picture.

  “At first, as the viewer’s eyes became adjusted to the murky natural light coming into the room from a single dirty window high on the opposite wall, all he could see was what appeared to be an ornate frame, without a picture in it, hanging on the wall. A closer inspection, with the aid of a match or cigarette lighter, revealed that the gilded frame with baroque scrollwork enclosed a fissure or crack in the gray plaster wall. The exposed wire, and the nail which had been driven into the wall to hold both the wire and the frame, were also visible. Within the frame, the wire, peaking to about twenty degrees at the apex—at the nail—resembled, if the viewer stood well back from the picture, a distant mountain range.”

  Berenice sighed. “I don’t understand it. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Exactly! No sense, but not nonsense. This was an irrational work in a rational setting. Debierue’s Nihilistic Surrealism, like Dada and Surrealism, is irrational. That’s the entire point of Dada, and of most of the other postwar art movements. Distortion, irrationality, and the unlikely juxtaposition of objects.”

  “What did the reviewers say about it?”

  “What the reviewers said in the newspapers isn’t important, Berenice. There’s a distinction between a reviewer and a critic, as you should know. The reviewer deals with art as a commodity. He’s got three or four shows a week to cover, and his treatment of them is superficial, at best. But the critic is interested in aesthetics, and in placing the work of art in the scheme of things—or even as a pattern of behavior.”

  “All right, then. What did the critics say about No. One?”

  “A great many things. But criticism begins with the structure, and often ends there, especially for those critics who believe that every work of art is autotelic. Autotelic. That means—”

  “I know what autotelic means. I studied literary criticism in college, and I’ve got a degree in English.”

  “Okay. What does it mean?”

  “It means that a work of art is complete in itself.”

  “Right! And what else does it mean, or imply?”

  “Just that. That the poem, or whatever, should be considered by itself, without reference to anything else.”

  “That’s right, but there’s more. It means that the artist himself should not be brought into the cr
iticism of the work being considered. And although I’m a structuralist, I don’t think that any work—poem, painting, novel—is autotelic. The personality of the artist is present in every work of art, and the critic has to dig it out as well as explicating the structure and form. Take pro football—”

  “I’d love to. It’s more interesting than painting.”

  “To you, yes, but I want to make an analogy. A good critic’s like a good football announcer on television. We see the same play that he does, but he breaks it down for us, reveals the structure and the pattern of the play. He explains what went wrong and what was right about the play. He can also tell us what is likely to come next. Also, because of the instant tape replay, he can even break down the play into its component parts for us to see again in slow motion. We do the same thing in art criticism sometimes, when we blow up details of a painting in slides.”

  “Your analogy doesn’t explain the ‘personality’ in the football play.”

  “Yes it does. This is the quarterback, who caused the play in the first place. That is, if the quarterback called the play. Sometimes the coach calls every play, sending in the new play every time with a substitute. If the announcer doesn’t know what the coach is like, what he has done before, or the quarterback, I’ll say, his explanation of the structure of the play is going to be shaky, and any prediction he makes won’t be valid. Do you follow me?”

  “I follow you.”

  “Good. Then you shouldn’t have any trouble in understanding the success of No. One. Only one person at a time was allowed to examine the picture. But there was no time limit set by the artist. Some visitors came downstairs immediately. Others remained for an hour or more, inconveniencing those waiting below. The average viewer was satisfied by a cursory inspection. But according to Hauptmann, there were a great many repeats.

  “One old Spanish nobleman from Sevilla visited Paris a half-dozen times for the sole purpose of taking another look at No. One. No visitor’s log was kept, but the fact that a vast number of people visited Debierue’s shop to see the picture is a matter of public record. Every Parisian artist of the time made the pilgrimage, usually bringing along some friends. And No. One was widely discussed.