The Unknown Masterpiece (2 page)

This connects with the
promise
of pictorial art, which has a very different history from that of painterly progress. It is in effect a history of magic and of miracle. It is a history as well of superstition and of fear. In his brilliant study
Likeness and Presence
, the art historian Hans Belting has written an astonishing history of the devotional image in early Christian art. The early Church had no interest in pictures that were produced by the exercise of pictorial skills. It was rather interested in images that materialized without the intervention of an artist at all—the way the face of Jesus was miraculously imprinted on Veronica’s veil, or Christ’s tortured body on the Shroud of Turin. The Church worshiped Saint Luke’s portrait of the Holy Virgin because it was believed that the Virgin herself magically formed her self-image on Luke’s panel. There was no interest whatever in aesthetics or in artistic virtuosity. Images, when authentic, were like relics: the saint was believed to be embodied in his or her icons, and could be prayed to for benign interventions. We still hear about wonder-working Virgins and
Sacri Bambini
. These are images that have no reference to museums of fine art or to connoisseurship or art appreciation, nor do they belong in collections. Stories about them appear in the Metro sections of newspapers, but not in the sections devoted to culture.

From the perspective of magic,
every
image has the possibility of coming to life, and perhaps the first images ever drawn, however crudely executed, were viewed with an awe that still remains a disposition of the most primitive regions of the human brain. This is why images have been forbidden in so many of the great religions of the world, and why they have been destroyed in the name of iconoclasm. It is why Plato was afraid of art, and drove artists from his Republic. History and literature are filled with legends of images that come to life (think of the portrait of Dorian Gray). Mythical artists like “Master Pygmalion” have been envied and emulated by those with Frenhoferian ambitions. Pygmalion fulfilled the dream that artists can turn their effigies into real beings. By carving and polishing, his statue came to life! “You’re in the presence of a woman. And you’re still looking for a picture,” Frenhofer tells his stupefied colleagues, who are unable to see either—who see only a “wall of paint.” And we are left in the end wondering if the old painter has lost his mind or the younger painters have lost their eyes.

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