The Underpainter (20 page)

During the long stretches when the various layers are drying, I add china objects to the collection and then catalogue them in the notebooks I keep for this purpose. I like to include a drawing of the piece as well as a few paragraphs concerning what I have learned about its manufacturer, the particular china painter (where applicable), the period, date, and so on. I enjoy drawing the designs on the pieces, then filling them in with watercolour. It makes me feel like a child.

Sometimes in the evening, when I am too tired to work, the grief, the remorse comes so close to me that I feel I could reach out and touch it with my hand, and then it’s almost more than I can bear. But mostly I am kept quite busy, what with cataloguing, underpainting, the collection, and my walks. Every so often my dealer calls from New York to tell me that a critic from some art magazine or another wants to interview me about my work. I always decline, using my advanced age, my feebleness as an excuse. The truth is, however, with the exception of stiffness and ill temper, I’m in perfectly good health, despite the fact that all this tidying up, this assembling and cataloguing, this burying under layers of paint seems like a preparation for my own death.

It was a critic who came up with the term “erasure” when I first exhibited the series. There is nothing, you understand, like an obscured subject to give the critics something to talk about. Even those who had been either indifferent or hostile to my work in the past wrote long, reflective essays about the hidden subject matter that, under the circumstances, they were forced
mostly to imagine. This led to some interesting fantasies. Some of the others ignored titles such as
The Sawhorse
or
The Lost Jane Eyre
or
Night in the China Hall
and refused to speculate about what was underneath the various layers. They wrote, instead, about the “act” of erasure; about absence, vacancy, abandonment. One or two of the men wrote about annihilation, about my decision to eliminate the object in my paintings, how this, in their opinion, would eventually lead to discarding the “art object” altogether and how my intentions had been “active” rather than “passive.” Not one of them, however, not one, had a word to say about the casting off of despair, about catharsis, anesthetic.

I was as amazed by this as I was by the fact that anyone had paid attention at all, though, after all these years in the art world, absolutely nothing should surprise me. But I was surprised by this, then doubly amazed when collectors opened their cheque-books. Couldn’t they see? Didn’t they know they were carrying home a rectangle of sorrow? Couldn’t they understand that grief itself would now be proudly displayed, hanging on their otherwise smooth living-room walls?

I added a particular prize — a piece of great rarity and beauty — to the collection this morning. From where I sit at this desk I can see it shining on the shelf across the room, and were I to turn to look at the window behind me, I would likely see it shining there as well. So bright it is, so rich in colour. It is a Sèvres dessert plate from the Services des Petits Métiers, which was painted in the middle of the last century by a man called
Suchet, a pupil of the great Develly. Earlier, Develly himself had painted a dessert service of more than one hundred pieces representing each of the industrial arts and crafts of France. George had told me about these with great enthusiasm, having seen the drawings for them when he visited Sèvres while on leave during the war.

The few times he was able to visit the Manufacture de Porcelaine, George had looked at pattern book after pattern book full of the kind of watercolours I attempt to make when I want to feel like a child. He was always delighted by the quality of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paper and by the permanence of the colour of the paint. He loved these small coloured drawings, he said, because they were so pristine and so fresh that he could almost see the hand that had held the brush centuries before. And once, he maintained that, sensing a presence near his left shoulder, he had involuntarily swung around, believing for a split second that the long-dead painter of china was standing behind him in the room.

I remember the pleasure he took in speaking to me one morning in the China Hall about the idea of the Develly series; how it had celebrated the most minor of the arts, the most minor craftsmen. Wallpaper painters, artificial-flower makers, jewellers, hatters, and all the skilled workers who produced the great porcelain at Sèvres. He told me that it seemed to him that Develly loved his own life, and the life that moved around him, so passionately that each piece became a hymn of praise concerning the sanctity of labour. No task, no worker was so small that they were not cherished by him, given his full attention, painstakingly and lovingly rendered.

The plate I added today has the workshops of lock and key makers painted on it; men in aprons bent over miniature forges, or preparing moulds, or studying the inner mechanisms of a lock. A frieze of keys surrounds the scene and the outer edge is ringed with gold leaf. George said once that he thought he might have worked with gold leaf, might have been a gilder in a previous life, at Sèvres or at one of the workshops in Germany. He told me this shortly after the end of the war. I was slightly shocked by this fond reference to what he must have felt was enemy terrain.

He looked surprised when I remarked on this. “I have no quarrel with the Germans,” he said, echoing the statements Rockwell had made when America finally entered the war. “It was curious,” he explained, “but as time passed I couldn’t dispel the idea that we were all in it together, that we were just vandals, really, bent on destroying western culture. Finally it seemed to me that Europe was one vast museum whose treasures were being smashed by hired thugs. We weren’t making history, we were destroying it… eliminating it. Churches that had been lovingly maintained for seven hundred years were being obliterated in an afternoon. Simple men — farm boys who could trace their families back to the time of the Saxons and the Gauls or the Hun — were dying at eighteen and leaving no heirs. There will be nothing left, I kept thinking, when this is over, nothing at all.”

When he spoke to me about the war years, George made only fleeting references to battles and bloodshed. I would have to wait for Augusta to tell me about all that in detail. Being in the business of cleaning up afterwards, she had been forced to view the war in terms of the unceasing cargo of ruined flesh delivered to
her ward. She was so steeped in blood resulting from combat that eventually she was unable to remember a military uniform unsullied by mud and gore, a boy’s body unblemished by wounds. All this despite the perfect billows of the dunes around the hospital at Étaples, the fresh wind from the sea. She confessed to me that George’s body had shocked her at first because of its wholeness. This was the only reference she ever made to the fact that they were lovers.

The Kearns family had been supplying the town of Davenport with china for over sixty years when war was declared and so had had correspondence with various employees of Sèvres and Haviland and Limoges. Before he left for France, George had carefully printed four or five names on the back page of the 1914 Baedeker his father had given him as a going-away gift. Old Mr. Kearns fancied himself a sort of francophile and had purchased the travel guide each year since the turn of the century, optimistically believing that he would book a passage at some time or another. To his mind there was no irony connected to this German guide to Paris. In the beginning he viewed the war as a wonderful travel opportunity for his son. And in some ways he was right, or so George would have had me believe.

Later, in the China Hall, George would describe the streets of Paris to me with such enthusiasm that had I not known better I might have been able to conclude that he had been “on leave” for the duration of the war. I myself have been there twice — both visits in peacetime — and I must say I found the place, beyond the wonders of its museums, confusing, exhausting, and expensive. But, oddly, George asserted that the minute he arrived he felt that he was returning to a life he had always known.

On his very first visit he left behind his companions who wanted to pursue the life of the cabarets and cafés and journeyed out to Sèvres to admire Develly’s work and to look for a certain Mr. Monier, who his father had said was a fine painter of china. The porcelain factory itself had ceased to function as such and was now employed in fabricating earthenware receptacles for the transport of nitroglycerine to the front. George spent several ecstatic hours in the Musée de Porcelaine, adjacent, where the director told him that Monier was working in a district of Paris known as the Marais. Then he scribbled an address on a piece of paper along with a rough, hand-drawn map of the streets leading to the spot, and George retraced his steps back into the centre of Paris.

It was at this point in his story that George became almost incoherent with excitement, began pacing up and down the China Hall, circling one hand in the air as if making an invisible drawing. “There were two worlds of art,” he declared. “One up there,” he pointed to the ceiling, “and one down here,” he gestured towards the ground.

When I asked him what on earth he meant, he explained that the nobles’ houses in the Marais district, abandoned since the revolution, had gradually been colonized by the
petits métiers —
artisans, craftsmen — during the nineteenth century.

“There were escutcheons over every doorway,” he said. “Marvellous, huge classical statues on many of the façades and, inside, beautiful crumbling plasterwork on the cornices. That sort of thing. And the walls, the walls were covered with carved panels and inset mirrors … all filthy, neglected, ignored, really. I saw chandeliers covered with so many spiderwebs that, at first, in
the dull light, I couldn’t make out what they were. Great crowds of gods and goddesses were painted on the ceilings. All the figures in the heights of these rooms were so large, so monumental, they looked like they had been made by a race of giants. And then, down below, the world was being reproduced in miniature.”

Monier, as it turned out, was working in the atelier of an artisan on the Rue du Portfoin, employed — since the war had made him redundant at Sèvres — in painting the china faces of small mechanized figures — automatons. When George found him, he was putting the finishing touches on the eyes of a little Alsatian girl in traditional dress, who, when set in motion, bent down, grasped, and then lifted and waved each of the Allies’ flags in succession.

George was enchanted. “Such delicate work,” he said to me, “there in the Hôtel de Chantebrion under a looming Neptune and gigantic plaster seashells.”

“They were making dolls then, in an old hotel?” I was having trouble visualizing the place he was describing.

“No, no,” he said impatiently, “not dolls. An automaton is not a toy. The place was crowded with the most skilled workers — milliners, seamstresses, jewellers, clock makers, metal workers, and so on. China painters.
Hôtel
is the French word for a large house … almost a palace, really. When I looked through the windows and across the courtyard, I could see Apollo’s horses carved above the stable door. In one corner of the room three people — two men and one woman — were working on the small Alsatian landscape where the little girl would wave her flags.”

I watched George turn inward as he revisioned the room he was describing. “Such delicate work,” he repeated.

Monier introduced George to “le Maître,” an old man called Lambert who had occupied the premises for fifty years, his father having opened the shop thirty years before that. It was he who explained the term
petit métier
to George and told him that just twenty years before, the Marais had been crowded with men and women dedicated to making the most beautiful and the most frivolous objects. He had specialized in Fantaisies à Musique, not just music boxes but an astonishing variety of objects: cigar boxes, decanters, inkwells, even folding chairs into which a musical movement had been incorporated so that they burst into melody the moment they were manipulated. His father’s
spécialité de maison
had been
paysages mécaniques
and
tableaux animés
, small idyllic worlds where animals frolicked, waterfalls tumbled, and lovers kissed before all became motionless once again. When George was shown examples of these, he felt his heart open, and then he was overcome by a tremendous sorrow when old Monsieur Lambert placed these treasures back on the shelf and said quietly, “There is not so much call for my things as there was before. Perhaps, after the war …”

“In fact,” George said to me, “the war finished them off altogether. Nothing beautiful and fragile could survive it” He paused at this point and looked out towards the street, towards Victoria Hall with its Palladian portico and Greek revival pillars, its utterly imported architectural style. “As the fighting went on,” he said quietly, “I knew that everything, absolutely everything, was dead or dying, was being pulled down or obliterated. A Belgian I met told me that he had tried to return to his village and had been completely unable to find it. Not a brick left.
Nothing. He thought he had lost his way or gone mad until, sticking out of the mud, he saw the metal head of a rooster that had been part of a weathervane on the church tower. He hauled it out of his knapsack and showed it to me. Not even the whole rooster, just the head. All that was left of his home town. It was about that time that Paris stopped being a comfort to me. I would visit Lambert’s studio and know I was visiting a ghost ship. Everything was dying. I would see men sandbagging and wrapping the statues in the Tuileries and I would want to shout at them to tell them they were wasting their time. Everything was disappearing. Both worlds of art … gone, and the rest of the world with it.”