{"id":18326,"date":"2016-08-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=90"},"modified":"2016-08-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-31T00:00:00","slug":"masterpiece-for-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/08\/masterpiece-for-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Masterpiece for One"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Maitre Frenhofer stands with Pygmalion and Orpheus in the pantheon of influential fictional artists. The painter of the Unknown Masterpiece<\/em><\/a> (or Unrecognized Masterpiece<\/em>) in Balzac\u2019s Le Chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre inconnu<\/a><\/em>, Frenhofer\u2019s utter devotion to his art inspired Cezanne, Picasso, and Rilke. The best-known testimony comes from Emile Bernard\u2019s recollection of Cezanne: \u201cOne evening when I was speaking to him about The Unknown Masterpiece<\/em> and of Frenhofer, the hero of Balzac\u2019s drama, he got up from the table, planted himself before me, and, striking his chest with his index finger, designated himself\u2014without a word, but through this repeated gesture\u2014as the very person in the story. He was so moved that tears filled his eyes\u201d (quoted in Dore Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art<\/em><\/a>, 9).<\/p>\n

Rilke retold the story with some variations in one of a series of letters about Cezanne:<\/p>\n

But in the midst of eating he stood up, when this person told about Frenhofer, the painter whom Balzac, with incredible foresight of coming developments, invented in his short story of Chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre inconnu<\/em> . . . and whom he has go down to destruction over an impossible task, through the discovery that there are actually no contours but rather many vibrating transitions\u2014learning this, the old man stands up from the table in spite of Mme Br\u00e9mond, who certainly did not favour such irregularities, and, voiceless with excitement, keeps pointing his finger distinctly towards himself and showing himself, himself, himself, painful as that may have been. It was not Zola who understood what the point was; Balzac had sensed long ahead that, in painting, something so tremendous can suddenly present itself, which no one can handle. (quoted in Ashton, 58)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frenhofer, c\u2019est moi<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dore Ashton suspects that Picasso never finished Balzac\u2019s (very short) novella, but that didn\u2019t keep him from depicting Maitre Frenhofer in etchings and engravings. According to Ashton, \u201cwhat most affected Picasso in the beginning was not so much the tragic story of Frenhofer as the role of women in the artists\u2019 lives, just as Balzac\u2019s first version was more directed to the love story of Gillette than to the aesthetic questions posed in the final version. Like Balzac, Picasso would only later dwell on the implications for the artist himself as epitomized in the Rembrandt-like portrait of Frenhofer. If Picasso had read the Balzac story thoroughly while at work on the thirteen etchings in the Vollard edition\u2014no one can be sure\u2014it is quite apparent from the etchings that what most affected him was Frenhofer\u2019s total obsession with the painting itself which, in the old Pygmalion mythology, was to become so real as to serve as mistress and beloved\u201d (Ashton, 90).<\/p>\n

In his introduction to a recent edition of the novella, Arthur Danto suggests that the Frenhofer\u2019s unrecognized masterpiece is the first Modernist painting. This in a story published in 1831!<\/p>\n

Balzac\u2019s story recounts a fictional encounter between the fictional Frenhofer and two real artists that took place in 1612. Franz Pourbus was the leading portrait painter of his time, the official portraitist to Marie de Medici, then Queen Mother and Regent of France. Balzac\u2019s other real artist, Nicholas Poisson, is a young prodigy, as yet unknown. The single student of the legendary Flemish painter Jan Mabuse (also real), Frenhofer represents the best of artistic tradition (Danto matches the painters to past, present, and future). The three first meet at Pourbus\u2019s studio, where Frenhofer critiques and corrects Pourbus\u2019s painting of St. Mary of Egypt. While Pourbus\u2019s painting is workmanlike, it lacks life and soul. For Frenhofer, the goal of the artist is not to imitate nature, but to express<\/em> it. \u201cA woman tilts her head this way, she holds her skirt like that, her eyes melt with a look of submissive sweetness, the shadow of her lashes tremble just so on her cheeks! That\u2019s it\u2014and that\u2019s not it. What\u2019s lacking? A trifle that\u2019s nothing at all, yet a nothing that\u2019s everything. You\u2019ve got the appearance of life, but you don\u2019t express it overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi<\/em> which might even be the soul, floating like a cloud over the envelope of flesh\u201d (15-16). Pourbus and Poisson watch in awe at the transformation that Frenhofer effects with a few strokes onto Pourbus canvas. They declare him to be a god of art.<\/p>\n

Frenhofer has himself been working on his own life\u2019s work, a portrait of a former lover, Catherine Lescault. The other painters are eager to see it, but Frenhofer refuses. The painting is unfinished, and to finish it, he needs the inspiration of an ideal living woman, a beauty unmarked by any flaw. Poisson happens to know such a woman, his mistress Gillette, and he and Pourbus eventually convince Frenhofer to show them his painting in exchange for permission to use Gillette as a model. Gillette understandably feels used, sacrificed to Poisson\u2019s greater passion for painting, but she reluctantly agrees. As Picasso recognized, the exchange turns on the parallelism of the artistic and the erotic gaze.<\/p>\n

When Frenhofer finally presents his masterpiece to the other painters, they are dumbfounded. They see \u201cnothing\u201d\u2014only a \u201cwall\u201d of paint without form or definition; the only human feature is an exquisitely rendered foot in one corner. After a moment of despair at his failure, Frenhofer declares, \u201cBy the body and blood of Christ, the two of you are envious thieves who want me to believe I\u2019ve spoiled her so you can steal her from me! But I can see her! . . . I see her, and she is marvelously beautiful!\u201d (43). The story ends in tragedy: Gillette knows that she and Poisson are finished, and the next day Frenhofer is found dead in his shadowy studio, having burned all his paintings.<\/p>\n

Much of the theory of painting that Frenhofer elaborates is standard-issue Romanticism, but Balzac fastens self-consciously on the critical dilemma that faced Romantic artists. Frenhofer\u2019s Catherine is to him a living woman, \u201ca woman with whom I weep and laugh and talk and think.\u201d If he let her be seen in public, he would \u201ccease being a father, a lover, and God Himself.\u201d Foreshadowing his eventual end, Frenhofer says, \u201cI\u2019m strong enough to burn my Catherine as I draw my dying breath, but to compel her to endure the gaze of a man, a young man, a painter? No, no! If anyone sullied her with a glance, I\u2019d kill him the next day. . . . you\u2019d have me subject my idol to the cold gaze and stupid criticisms of fools?\u201d (34). The closer she gets to perfection, to life, the more reluctant he is to show her to the world: \u201cPoetry and women show themselves naked only to their lovers!\u201d (34). The perfect painter is the perfect lover, and thus paints only for himself<\/em>. Were he to share Catherine, his love would be as doomed as that between Gillette and Poisson. Because his painting so perfectly expresses its subject, because it is so nearly alive, he cannot show her off without prostituting her.<\/p>\n

Frenhofer to the contrary, the dilemma isn\u2019t inherent in art. It\u2019s a self-imposed dilemma, the result of an artistic stance that already verges toward solipsism. M.H. Abrams characerized Romantic aesthetics as an aesthetics of self-expression. For Romantics, art doesn\u2019t aim at mimesis, but at authenticity: The greatest art is that which best expresses the powerful overflow of the artist\u2019s feelings and emotions. The poet or artist isn\u2019t a mirror but a lamp, illuminated by an inner fire and casting light into the world. Eric Gans puts the dilemma in terms of the roles of creator and spectator: \u201cFrenhofer . . . wishes to combine the absolute domination of the creator-subject with the desire of the \u2018other\u2019: by placing himself on both sides of the formal barrier at once, he can behave as though no such barrier existed.\u201d This fusion is possible in a \u201cpurely solipsistic universe\u201d; in Balzac\u2019s final version of the story, he emphasizes \u201cthe artistic failure that must result from this lack of respect for esthetic form: the attempted fusion of desire and fulfillment destroys the objective reality of the appearance that is to arouse the desire of the spectator.\u201d Gans thus sees the story as a vindication of Balzackian realism, \u201ca demonstration of the ultimate capacity of the classical esthetic to \u2018deconstruct\u2019 any attempt at romantic transcendence founded on the imaginary.\u201d The story simultaneously points to \u201cthe modern conception of an art whose content is no longer the image of the ideal, but the sensuous record of its pursuit\u201d (Gans, \u201cBalzac\u2019s Unkowable Masterpiece and the Limits of the Classical Esthetic,\u201d The French Issue<\/em> 90:4 [May, 1975] 504-516).<\/p>\n

If art is conceived not as self-expression but as service<\/em>, Frenhofer\u2019s dilemma evaporates. The artist need not play the incompatible roles of God, father, lover, and so he no longer incestuously demands exclusive rights to his work. It is his in that he creates it; but it is not<\/em> his in that he creates it for the sake of patron or public. The artist does not turn into a pimp when he releases his beloved to the world. Art, and the talent or genius that enables it, is one of the goods that, according to Augustine, is possessed only by dispossession, possessed only when it is given away (On Christian Teaching<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maitre Frenhofer stands with Pygmalion and Orpheus in the pantheon of influential fictional artists. The painter of the Unknown Masterpiece (or Unrecognized Masterpiece) in Balzac\u2019s Le Chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre inconnu, Frenhofer\u2019s utter devotion to his art inspired Cezanne, Picasso, and Rilke. The best-known testimony comes from Emile Bernard\u2019s recollection of Cezanne: \u201cOne evening when I was speaking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,1652],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-balzac"],"yoast_head":"\nMasterpiece for One<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Maitre Frenhofer stands with Pygmalion and Orpheus in the pantheon of influential fictional artists. 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