The Unknown Masterpiece Read Free Page A

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