Authors: Georges Perec,David Bellos
“It's what you wanted ⦔
“Yes, I'd wanted it, really wanted it ⦠I'd wanted to erase myself, make myself disappear ⦠I'd wanted to be everybody so as to end up as nobody, I'd wanted to protect myself beneath innumerable masks, to be inaccessible, to be impregnable ⦠The result? I went too far ⦠It was asking too much to get away with it entirely, there were bound to be domains where it didn't work ⦔
“Which domains?”
“I met Mila, I never should have ⦠She didn't pick me up: I was the one who went after her. That was my first mistake ⦠Being a forger means taking everything from other people and giving nothing of yourself ⦠I gave Mila nothing ⦠I didn't pay attention, I remained indifferent. It was natural. I went after her. She came to me. I plodded on down my own path. Why should I have swerved to the left or right? She left. I missed her. So what? At the time I was working on the Hoard of Split. I was very busy. That's all.”
“Was it serious?”
“No. Why should it be serious? It was almost natural ⦠a tiny slip of the steering ⦠Did I love Mila? I've no idea, I never asked myself. I loved paintings and art books. I loved spending days and days making a fake Baldovinetti. That's what I loved ⦠Didn't mean a thing. But I didn't know it was meaningless. That's how it was ⦔
“Then what?”
“Then nothing ⦠Life went on as if nothing had happened â¦
Only a tiny crack had appeared in the magnificent ivory tower that protected me ⦠One evening I wanted to see Mila ⦠and I didn't dare go ⦠She'd left me two weeks before, without saying anything to me, for no obvious reason, simply because she expected something from me that I hadn't managed to give her ⦠maybe just being there ⦠I didn't dare and that bothered me ⦠I went out and spent the evening at the cinema ⦠That's not something I did very often ⦠It bored me ⦠I left halfway through the film, and found a bar. I had a drink. I probably had too much ⦠I went for a walk along the street ⦠At Place de la Madeleine I picked up a girl and took her home. In the morning I told myself I'd been an idiot and ought to have stayed at home and got on with some work. Which is what I did on the evenings that followed.”
“Was the work going well?”
“Extremely well ⦠You're amazed, aren't you? You think it would make better sense if I'd been working poorly, making silly mistakes, wasting my time, or not wanting to work, or working without my heart in it ⦠But it wasn't so ⦠My ivory tower was still standing ⦠I was working only too well, right through the night ⦠That's what made sense ⦠plugging without delay the little wobble I'd felt ⦠Getting back on my usual track ⦠The straight track ⦔
“Is that what set it all off?”
“Was that it, or was it something else? That was it, and there was also something else. It was that among other things. Tonight that was how it started because I'm telling you about it ⦠Something has to
be the start of it ⦠Why not Mila? But it could just as easily have been Jérôme getting old ⦠or my slow realisation of what my true position was, the feeling that I was being used, being taken advantage of, or the simple, extremely simple accumulation of pastiches ⦠masks, more masks, the burden of masks ⦠The things that were stifling me without my knowing why, without my knowing what was stifling me, without my knowing that what was making me a living was the same as what was making me die ⦠It's what I'd sought ⦠So what? I'd sought immediate life, instant victory ⦠I had to live and fight ⦠I didn't want to fight ⦠I was fighting in the shadows, under impenetrable armour, I was fighting against shadows. I pitted my patience against their genius. Of course I won every time. I was cheating. I didn't know I was cheating ⦠But I had to wake up one day ⦠It didn't matter when or where ⦠It happened, it had to. It happened because of Mila, but it could have happened because of something else. It doesn't matter. It began ⦠The rest is like unravelling a piece of knitwear ⦠The tower collapsed, to begin with only a tiny piece broke away, but then it crumbled faster and faster ⦠I tried to shore things up, to take cover, to rebuild ⦠but it was pointless ⦔
I went back to France at the end of November; I spent a few days in Paris buying materials and went to Dampierre. Madera had done things properly: he had a whole section of his basement remodelled as a studio. There was a large armchair in the middle of the room with low tables on either side of it, a wonderful wood-and-steel easel, and countless spotlights. He'd had carpet laid, and put in a shower and even a telephone so I wouldn't need to be disturbed during the day. There were tables for paint pots, bookcases in every corner, more tables, a turntable, a refrigerator, another armchair, a sofa, a bed ⦠It was the fairest prison you could imagine. I lived there for fifteen months and never went outside, except for a few lightning trips to Paris and Geneva. I did nothing apart from the Condottiere â¦
The start was very easy. I took ten days just to set things up: sorting out my filing cards, pinning up the reproductions I had got hold of, laying out the brushes I would use, finding the right places for paints and liquids. It all went swimmingly; I think I was more happy than not, as I always am at the start of a new job ⦠Then I started to smooth down the wooden panel; that was a routine job, a tiresome one because you have to be very patient and take a lot of care. It took me ten or twelve days because I went at it very very slowly. But the panel came out almost completely blank. It was a fine piece of oak with almost no damage, so I could start on the
gesso duro
almost
straight away. That was the first difficult operation. Again it was a game of patience, a steady addition of layers of plaster and glue. At the beginning of January everything was ready and I could get started on the real job; I began on plain sheets of paper, then on cardboard, trial canvases, and roughly prepared panels. I would spend part of each day copying details from the Condottiere or other Antonello portraits, and the rest of the time inventing details of my own. That's pretty much all I did for six months, without painting a single stroke. Every week I sanded the panel down a tiny bit and added a few layers of
gesso duro
to keep it in perfect readiness ⦠That's when it got really difficult ⦠I had my panel in front of me. But I was not like any other painter, and it was not like any other canvas. It was not the same as painting a windmill or a suburban landscape or a sunset ⦠I had to give an account of something that already existed, I had to create a new language, but I was not free: the grammar and the syntax were given, but the words had no meaning; I did not have the right to use them. That was what I had to invent, a new vocabulary, a new set of signs ⦠It had to be identifiable at first glance, but nonetheless it had to be different ⦠It was a tough game to play â¦
At the start you think, or you pretend to think, it is easy. Who is Antonello da Messina? Started out in the Sicilian School, strongly influenced by Flemish painters, with secondary but still perceptible influence of the Venetian School. You can find that in any course book. It will do for a first approach. But what next? Spareness and control. That's what you tell yourself, and you think you've said it all.
But what are the signs of that sparseness? The signs of control? They don't come all by themselves. They come painfully, slowly, confusedly ⦠You sit in front of your canvas or your board for hours and hours. There's nothing there except the set of laws that constrain you and that you're not allowed to break. First you have to understand them, completely, from top to bottom. Without the slightest error. You timidly venture to make a sketch. You subject it to criticism. Something's not right. You think you're changing a detail but you've made the whole structure collapse in one go. For six months I played cat and mouse with my
Portrait of a Man
. I gave him a beard, a moustache, a scar, freckles, a snub nose, a Roman nose, a flat nose, a hook nose, a Greek nose, armour, a brooch, short hair, long hair, a bonnet, a fur hat, a helmet, a drooping lip, a hare-lip ⦠I could never get it right. I would look at the Condottiere. I would tell myself: look, that tautening of the muscle is such and such a shadow underscored in such and such a way with an arc of shading on the cheek, and that shading, conversely, is the whole expression of the face, its bodying forth, it's what makes one thing invisible and another thing shine out. It's from the overall play of shade and light that the facial sinews spring, packed with energy, with their own will. That was what I had to get hold of, without a model to copy. That was what struck me the most. For instance, I compared the Paris
Portrait of a Man
to the one in Vienna. It was the complete opposite. The Condottiere is a man in middle age â or rather younger, between thirty and thirty-five; whereas the Vienna portrait is of someone who is at most twenty. One is decisive, the other floppy â soft face, sunken features, receding
chin, small eyes, huge bare cheeks, no muscles, no vigour. On the other hand the tunic is brighter and sharper than the face, with pleats visible as well as a brooch. I could have been wrong about the comparison, but what seemed most obvious to me was the displacement of the signs. The Vienna portrait wasn't hard to do; it could have been anyone. But the Condottiere, since it was him I'd decided to paint, had to be a face. I went round and round this realisation, I could not square the circle. To begin with I was quite taken with the idea of adorning my Condottiere with a breastplate. It would simplify a lot of things; it would allow me to play with the lighting, the grey of the breastplate and the grey of the eyes, just as in the other painting everything revolves around ochre: the headgear and the tunic, the eyes, the hair, the greenish brown background and the light ochre of the skin. I would have done a Condottiere in grey: helmet and breastplate, eyes, fairly fair hair, and very dull skin in light grey like the young man in the Botticelli at the Louvre. Only it didn't make any sense. What use did a Condottiere have for a breastplate, seeing that he was obviously sheer strength in his own right? A breastplate or cuirass was a sign, a too facile sign, just as it would have been too facile to paint him in accordance with the idea that the Romantics gave us of Italian mercenaries of the Renaissance â as a crass and boozy swashbuckling musketeer. I dropped the breastplate. I dressed him in a vaguely red tunic; but it was too close to the real one ⦠I tried again ⦠Every day, ten hours a day, for six months. Then I thought I'd got it. My Condottiere would be seen three-quarters, like the real one and the Vienna portrait and the Florence Humanist,
hatless, the ground would be slightly more visible, the tunic would be laced but without the laces standing out, and would have a few just visible pleats at shoulder height. I settled on this costume after a great number of trials and not before going to the National Library to check whether it was actually possible. It could just about work; I could lift all the details from different works â the collar from the Vienna portrait, the tunic lacing from a Holbein, and the general configuration of the head from a Memling. The Condottiere's complexion alone took me two weeks; I couldn't pin it down; it had to match the colour of the tunic, it was supposed to set the key for all the other colours; I ended up picking a rather dull ochre, with a swarthy skin, black hair, very dark brown eyes, thick lips that were a shade darker, a
lie-de-vin
tunic, a dark red background, slightly lighter on the right hand side. Each choice entailed full-scale sketches, hesitating, pausing, backtracking, and making heroic decisions. I think I was trying to be too careful. It was all done. Ahead. With such precision that I couldn't go wrong, that the slightest touch of my brush on the wood panel would be definitive and final. That was the way I had to work, of course, but in this instance the margin for error had been completely eliminated. Any hesitation would have obliged me to start again from scratch, to sand the board down and redo the
gesso duro
. I was scared. There was something very odd about it. I'd never been scared of getting a fake wrong. On the contrary, I'd always been confident of getting it right with ease. But in this case I took whole days making up my mind about a colour, a gesture, a shadow.
The hardest part obviously was that celebrated tautness in the
jaw. It was impossible to pastiche without creating a double, and there was no sense in that. In the end I settled for using Memling's portrait as my model: a very thick and powerful neck, with the first minute signs of a double chin, very deep eyes, a line on each side of the nose and a fairly thick mouth. I would put the strength into the neck, into the articulation of the head, in the very high and straight way it was held, and in the lips. It was all fine on the drafts. On the trial paintings in gouache it even turned out rather splendidly: a complex melange of Memling and Antonello sufficiently corrected, with a very pure look in the eyes, immediate contours that yielded easily at first and then thickened, became impermeable, turning hard and merciless. No cruelty, no weakness. What I wanted. Pretty much exactly what I was after â¦
It was another month before I started really painting. I had to get my pots, brushes and rags ready. I took three days' rest. I began to paint sitting in the armchair, with my palette within easy reach, and the panel set on the easel with its four corners wrapped in cotton wool and rags so that the metal angles that held it in place would leave no mark. I had an elbow support and a crutch to keep my hand steady, a huge visor to keep the glare of the spotlights off my eyes, and wore magnifying goggles. An extraordinary set of safety devices. I would paint for twenty minutes and then stop for two hours. I sweated so much I had to change three or four times a day. From then on fear never left me. I don't know why but I had no confidence at all, I never managed to have a clear vision of what I was trying to do, I couldn't say what my panel would be like when I'd finished painting
it; I wasn't able to guarantee that it would look like any of the dozens of more or less completed drafts lying around the room. I didn't understand some of my own details, I was unable to get a grip on the overall project, to recognise it in the smallest touch, to feel it taking shape. I was stumbling onwards, despite the innumerable safeguards I'd set up. Previously, I'd been able to paint any Renaissance picture in a couple of months, but now, after four months' work, in mid-September, I still had the whole face to do â¦