The Unknown Masterpiece Read Free Page B

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