The Shape of a Pocket Read online

  They ambled out of the field and took the path down. Every evening Delphine leads, and every evening Hirondelle is the last. Most of the others join the file in the same order, too. The regularity of this somehow suits their patience.

  I push against the lame one’s rump to get her moving, and I felt her massive warmth, as I did every evening, coming up to my shoulder under my singlet. Allez, I told her, allez, Tulipe, keeping my hand on her haunch, which jutted out like the corner of a table.

  In the mud their steps made almost no noise. Cows are very delicate on their feet: they place them like models turning on high-heeled shoes at the end of their to-and-fro. I’ve even had the idea of training a cow to walk on a tightrope. Across the stream, for instance!

  The running sound of the stream was always part of our evening descent, and when it faded the cows heard the toothless spit of the water pouring into the trough by the stable where they would quench their thirst. A cow can drink about thirty litres in two minutes.

  Meanwhile, that evening we were making our slow way down. We were passing the same trees. Each tree nudged the path in its own way. Charlotte stopped where there was a patch of green grass. I tapped her. She went on. It happened every evening. Across the valley I could see the already mown fields.

  Hirondelle was letting her head dip with each step, as a duck does. I rested my arm on her neck, and suddenly I saw the evening as from a thousand years away:

  Louis’s herd walking fastidiously down the path, the stream babbling beside us, the heat subsiding, the trees nudging us, the flies around their eyes, the valley and the pine trees on the far crest, the smell of piss as Delphine pissed, the buzzard hovering over the field called La Plaine Fin, the water pouring into the trough, me, the mud in the tunnel of trees, the immeasurable age of the mountain, suddenly everything there was indivisible, was one. Later each part would fall to pieces at its own rate. Now they were all compacted together. As compact as an acrobat on a tightrope.

  ‘Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one,’ said Heraclitus, twenty-nine thousand years after the Chauvet paintings were made.

  Only if we remember this unity and the darkness we spoke of, can we find our way into the space of those first paintings.

  Nothing is framed in them; more important, nothing meets. Because the animals run and are seen in profile (which is essentially the view of a poorly armed hunter seeking a target) they sometimes give the impression that they’re going to meet. But look more carefully: they cross without meeting.

  Their space has absolutely nothing in common with that of a stage. When experts pretend that they can see here ‘the beginnings of perspective’, they are falling into a deep, anachronistic trap. Pictorial systems of perspective are architectural and urban – depending upon the window and the door. Nomadic ‘perspective’ is about coexistence, not about distance.

  Deep in the cave, which meant deep in the earth, there was everything: wind, water, fire, faraway places, the dead, thunder, pain, paths, animals, light, the unborn … They were there in the rock to be called to. The famous imprints of life-size hands (when we look at them we say they are ours) – these hands are there, stencilled in ochre, to touch and mark the everything-present and the ultimate frontier of the space this presence inhabits.

  The drawings came, one after another, sometimes to the same spot, with years or perhaps centuries between them, and the fingers of the drawing hand belonging to a different artist.

  All the drama that in later art becomes a scene painted on a surface with edges is compacted here into the apparition that has come through the rock to be seen. The limestone opens for it, lending it a bulge here, a hollow there, a deep scratch, an overhanging lip, a receding flank.

  When an apparition came to an artist, it came almost invisibly, trailing a distant, unrecognisably vast sound, and he or she found it and traced where it nudged the surface, the facing surface, on which it would now stay visible even when it had withdrawn and gone back into the one.

  Things happened that later millennia found it hard to understand. A head came without a body. Two heads arrived, one behind the other. A single hind leg chose its body, which already had four legs. Six antlers settled in a single skull.

  It doesn’t matter what size we are when we nudge the surface: we may be gigantic or small – all that matters is how far we have come through the rock.

  The drama of these first painted creatures is neither to the side nor to the front, but always behind, in the rock. From where they came. As we did, too …

  5

  Penelope

  You have to see them. Words can’t get round them. And reproduction sends them back to where they came from. (Most of her works originate in photographs.) You have to be within touching distance of them.

  It has been said that Velazquez was (is) very important for her. I can believe it. One or two of the things I wan’t to say about her might also refer to him, but to few other painters I can think of. The precondition for their common stance is a certain form of anonymity, a stepping aside.

  Vija Celmins is sixty-three years old. She was born in Riga. Her parents emigrated to the US. For thirty years she lived in Venice, California. Now she is in New York.

  My bet is that when she was in the Prado, discovering Velazquez, one painting went straight to her heart – the Tapestry Weavers.

  She both paints and draws, paints in oils, draws with graphite. The work is highly finished and shows what things look like – an electric fire, for example, a TV set, a hotplate, a pistol. These are not from photos; they are life-size, and painted like the Rokeby Venus. I don’t say this to compare genius, but to convey the kind of observation, in which tonal precision is so important, working within a patient and very tactful technique of searching.

  Her other subjects are motorways, Second World War planes in the sky, the surface of the moon, Hiroshima after the bomb, the surface of deserts, the mid-ocean, and the night sky with stars. Only it’s perhaps misleading to call these her subjects. Rather they are the places from which news came to her in her studio in Venice. And frequently this news came via photographs. (Sometimes, as with the ocean, via photographs she herself took.)

  I picture her in her studio shutting her eyes in order to see – because what she wants to see – or has to see – is always far away. She opens them to look only at her drawing. What she does with her shut eyes is like what we do when we put a sea shell to our ear to listen to the sea.

  She draws galactic space, she never goes out, and she does not let her considerable imagination run free. To imagine is too easy and too consuming. She knows that she has to stay at her post for years. Doing what? I’d say: waiting.

  And this is where Velazquez’s Tapestry Weavers offers us a clue. Vija Celmins is the artist as Penelope. Far away the pitiless Trojan War continues. Hiroshima is razed. A man on fire runs away. A roof burns. Meanwhile the sea which separates, and the sky which looks down, are utterly indifferent. And here, where she is, nothing is meaningful, except her unlikely and possibly absurd fidelity.

  For thirty years she ignored trends, fashion and artistic hyperbole. Her commitment was to the far away. Such fidelity was sustainable because of two things: a deep pictorial scepticism and a highly disciplined patience.

  Celmins’ scepticism tells her that painting can never get the better of appearances. Painting is always behind. But the difference is that, once finished, the image remains fixed. This is why the image has to be full –not of resemblance but of searching. All tricks wear thin. Only what comes unasked has a hope.

  She plays a game called To Fix the Image in Memory. She takes eleven pebbles from the beach to look at (like everybody does when idle) and she makes casts of them in bronze and paints them. Can you tell which is which? You can? Are you sure? Then how? This is a close-up exercise in scepticism. (And it’s a way of giving value to the original pebbles.)

  Unlike the first Penelope, she does not undo every nig
ht what she has woven during the day – in order to keep her worldly suitors at bay. Yet it comes to the same thing, for next day she will continue to move slowly with her graphite across the shimmering water which never stops and when at last she finishes one sheet of paper, she takes another. Or, if it’s the night sky she’s doing, she moves from galaxy to galaxy. Her patience comes from an awareness of the distance to be covered.

  ‘I think there’s something profound,’ she once said, ‘about working in material that is stronger than words, and is about some other place which is a little more mysterious.’

  None of this would, in itself, be interesting unless you happened to know her and like her. (I myself do not know her.) Her contribution is not to argument. It is tangible and lies in the mysterious images which are framed behind glass: the images you have to be in touching distance of.

  I explain her to myself as Penelope because these images are so handmade (staying at home, head bent, working for years and years), whilst the news they bring – of war, unbearable distances, disappearances, a wisp of smoke from a gun just fired – is bad or threatening.

  And this strange marriage leads to a strange transformation. She squares up, square centimetre by square centimetre, the photo of the sea and she transcribes devotedly, forgetting herself. She is too intelligent and too sceptical to copy, she transcribes with all the fidelity she knows. And when at last it is finished, there is an image of the cruel sea, or the cruel sea photographed in a killing instant, and everywhere, all over it, you see the touch of a loving hand. It is visibly and infinitely handmade.

  It is the same with all her paintings and drawings. They look unflinchingly at what is, and at what man does, and at the dimensions of solitude, and they are systematically touched with love.

  What Homer did with his dactylic hexameters (long-short-short) Celmins does with the pressure of her fingers – a kind of Morse code of the pencil. And so, thanks to this constant measure, her chilling images of distance are warmed, and this gives us pause, makes us wonder.

  6

  The Fayum Portraits

  They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written. Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us, as if they had been painted last month. Why? This is the riddle.

  The short answer might be that they were a hybrid, totally bastard art-form, and that this heterogeneity corresponds with something in our present situation. Yet to make this answer comprehensible we have to proceed slowly.

  They are painted on wood – often linden, and some are painted on linen. In scale the faces are a little smaller than life. A number are painted in tempera; the medium used for the majority is encaustic, that is to say, colours mixed with beeswax, applied hot if the wax is pure, and cold if it has been emulsified.

  Today we can still follow the painter’s brush strokes or the marks of the blade he used for scraping on the pigment. The preliminary surface on which the portraits were done was dark. The Fayum painters worked from dark to light.

  What no reproduction can show is how appetising the ancient pigment still is. The painters used four colours apart from gold: black, red, and two ochres. The flesh they painted with these pigments makes one think of the bread of life itself. The painters were Greek Egyptian. The Greeks had settled in Egypt since the conquest of Alexander the Great, four centuries earlier.

  They are called the Fayum portraits because they were found at the end of the last century in the province of Fayum, a fertile land around a lake, a land called the Garden of Egypt, eighty kilometres west of the Nile, a little south of Memphis and Cairo. At that time a dealer claimed that portraits of the Ptolemies and Cleopatra had been found! Then the paintings were dismissed as fakes. In reality they are genuine portraits of a professional urban middle class – teachers, soldiers, athletes, Serapis priests, merchants, florists. Occasionally we know their names – Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine …

  They were found in necropolises for they were painted to be attached to the mummy of the person portrayed, when he or she died. Probably they were painted from life (some must have been because of their uncanny vitality); others, following a sudden death, may have been done posthumously.

  They served a double pictorial function: they were identity pictures – like passport photos – for the dead on their journey with Anubis, the god with the jackal’s head, to the Kingdom of Osiris; secondly and briefly, they served as mementoes of the departed for the bereaved family. The embalming of the body took seventy days, and sometimes after this, the mummy would be kept in the house, leaning against a wall, a member of the family circle, before being finally placed in the necropolis.

  Stylistically, as I’ve said, the Fayum portraits are hybrid. Egypt by that time had become a Roman province governed by Roman prefects. Consequently the clothes, the hairstyles, the jewellery of the sitters followed the recent fashions in Rome. The Greeks, who made the portraits, used a naturalist technique which derived from the tradition established by Apelles, the great Greek master of the fourth century BC. And, finally, these portraits were sacred objects in a funerary ritual which was uniquely Egyptian. They come to us from a moment of historical transition.

  And something of the precariousness of this moment is visible in the way the faces are painted, as distinct from the expression on the faces. In traditional Egyptian painting nobody was seen in full-face because a frontal view opens the possibility to its opposite: the back view of somebody who has turned and is leaving. Every painted Egyptian figure was in eternal profile, and this accorded with the Egyptian preoccupation with the perfect continuity of life after death.

  Yet the Fayum portraits, painted in the ancient Greek tradition, show men, women and children seen full-face or three-quarters full-face. This format varies very little and all of them are as frontal as pictures from a photo-mat. Facing them, we still feel something of the unexpectedness of that frontality. It is as if they have just tentatively stepped towards us.

  Among the several hundred known portraits, the difference of quality is considerable. There were great master-craftsmen and there were provincial hacks. There were those who summarily performed a routine, and there were others (surprisingly many in fact) who offered hospitality to the soul of their client. Yet the pictorial choices open to the painter were minute; the prescribed form very strict. This is paradoxically why, before the greatest of them, one is aware of enormous painterly energy. The stakes were high, the margin narrow. And in art these are conditions which make for energy.

  I want now to consider just two actions. First, the act of a Fayum portrait being painted, and, secondly, the action of our looking at one today.

  Neither those who ordered the portraits, nor those who painted them, ever imagined their being seen by posterity. They were images destined to be buried, without a visible future.

  This meant that there was a special relationship between painter and sitter. The sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity.*

  In other words, the Fayum painter was summoned not to make a portrait, as we have come to understand the term, but to register his client, a man or a woman, looking at him. It was the painter rather than the ‘model’ who submitted to being looked at. Each portrait he made began with this act of submission. We should consider these works not as portraits, but as paintings about the experience of being looked at by Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine …

  The address, the approach is different from anything we find later in the history of portraits. Later ones were painted f
or posterity, offering evidence of the once living to future generations. Whilst still being painted, they were imagined in the past tense, and the painter, painting, addressed his sitter in the third person – either singular or plural. He, She, They as I observed them. This is why so many of them look old even when they are not.

  For the Fayum painter the situation was very different. He submitted to the look of the sitter, for whom he was Death’s painter or, perhaps more precisely, Eternity’s painter. And the sitter’s look, to which he submitted, addressed him in the second person singular. So that his reply – which was the act of painting – used the same personal pronoun: Toi, Tu, Esy, Ty … who is here. This in part explains their immediacy.

  Looking at these ‘portraits’ which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy. The contract may be hard for us to grasp, but the look speaks to us, particularly to us today.

  If the Fayum portraits had been unearthed earlier, during, say, the eighteenth century, they would, I believe, have been considered as little more than a curiosity. To a confident, expansive culture these little paintings on linen or wood would probably have seemed diffident, clumsy, cursory, repetitive, uninspired.

  The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!