Dawn, just as it came to Australian skies, a woman of bad character in a cloak of red possum skins

Why is it that there are so many bathroom mirrors covered with drying things in The Recognitions? Why so many recurring phrases and snatches of conversation placed into the mouths of so many different characters, not all of whom can simply be imitating each other ("maybe we're fished for" being one such, remarks about death "before it became vulgar" made by Esme and Basil Valentine)?

I thought, before I was as far into it as I am now, that I might write a post about The Recognitions alongside What's Bred in the Bone, as they're both concerned with forgery, artists, artistic pursuits, etc.  And there are some commonalities: they're both set largely in the same time period, much closer to the the time Gaddis was writing than that when Davies was, albeit not at all in the same places, and, for that matter, Francis' forgeries are all done before WWII and Wyatt's, with one exception, after.  (And I'm not sure if the first forgery, done "in the manner of Memling", was actually made by Wyatt to be sold fraudulently, even if that is ultimately what happens to it, to be purchased by Recktall Brown, though if it were not, that would be another commonality between his and Francis' histories, both of their Meisterstücke* painted in a bygone manner and ultimately mistaken for the genuine work of bygone painters.)  And both Francis and Wyatt have styles that are, they feel, theirs, which are out of step with contemporary practice, but which to abandon in favor of more contemporary composition—not, of course, to disparage contemporary composition; Francis, at least, esteems some of it—would be in some way dishonest.

We get quite a lot about Francis' artistic development, but very little about Wyatt's: he draws; he's consumed with fever; he copies a table and starts a painting of his mother ("There's something about a ... an unfinished piece of work, a ... a thing like this where ... do you see? Where perfection is still possible?"), which I can't remember if he ever finishes; then all of a sudden he's in Paris, late of Munich, and that's about it.  But each of them grinds his own colors, makes his own paint, does everything all quite old-fashioned, right down to their handwriting, Francis with an Italic hand while Wyatt is described at one point as having some sort of Gothic.  Of course one quite salient difference is that Francis develops his own style that's of a piece with prevailing Old Master styles but is not in the style of any one particular of them, which is why, after Drollig Hansel and The Wedding at Cana are taken to be genuine works of an unknown master, he stops painting entirely: he only could paint in his own style, but as a practical matter that's no longer an option (noöne seems to have thought it was ever really an option for him to paint that way in propria persona, living when he did; he'd probably have gotten the same reception Wyatt did in Paris after refusing to bribe a critic—here I'd like to refer to the case of Odd Nerdrum, a painter whose name I always think is Odd Nosdam, in James Elkin's pamphlet What Happened to Art Criticism, this point being just about the only thing I can remember, aside from that I thought its discussion of Danto a little shaky, from my long-ago reading of it, viz., that even though one might think that Hilt Kramer would "enlist Nerdrum as a major painter", "he can't quite bring himself to [do] so, perhaps because he sense just how strangely lost in time Nerdrum really is" (so you see the point is really about Kramer, but Nerdrum has the better name).  I thought there was a sort of ironic tu quoque in which Kramer was caught out rejecting a similarly-spirited Zurück zu Rembrandt! movement on the grounds that it was insufficiently theoretically motivated, showing that even the New Criterion types want conceptual artists to lie behind even nonconceptual art, but a briefer flipthrough of the brief pamphlet fails to uncover it); Wyatt, on the other hand, does indeed have a career as a forger of quite determinate painters, works in their styles, and all that.  (The extent of Francis' activities in Saraceni's restorative operations is not actually that clear.)

I can't help but wonder what Francis Cornish, reader at an early age of Le Morte d'Arthur, made of the name "Saraceni".  Seems a warning.

Now, however, I've sort of lost the thread with What's Bred in the Bone and I've got around 600 pages left to go in The Recognitions, so I'm not sure that post will ever get written.  It would surely have been an interesting one.

*foreign term used only because "masterpiece" in English has become so dilute: it's a fair bet in Wyatt's case, and quite explicit in Francis', that these works are the ones that establish them in their own rights, ending their apprenticeships.

SUPER BONUS ODD NERDRAGE: Christ, dude, watch it with the brains. Uh. This dude's lips are too red.

Comments

[Kriston]

O hai. I would think that Kramer would not be able to look past Nerdrum's frequent invocations of Greenbergian kitsch when describing his own work specifically and the progress of painting broadly. It's hard to find things in Elkins's pamphlet because it's hard to find that pamphlet, but I don't recall the Rembrandt discussion, and now I want to know on what grounds he rejected this revival—I recall dimly something in the Observer along those lines.

[ben wolfson]

It's not hard for me to find that pamphlet. It's right over there, to my left. Looks like it's to the right of Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music and to the left of The Relevance of the Beautiful (if I'm remembering the title right—I'm basing these judgements on the hard-to-make-out spines).

He doesn't say anything more specific than what I've reported about Kramer and Nerdrum. I don't know when the latter started talking about kitsch—was it constant throughout his career?

(I don't recall whether the discussion was actually about Rembrandt—I was speaking darkly, with allusions.)