An October Morning at the Courtauld
Edouard Manet - Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe (around 1863-68) - photo accessed here.
Last Monday the city was blanketed by an ominous amber sky – apparently, remnants of Ophelia blowing in - Saharan dust and Iberian fire. The preceding days had been uncharacteristically warm for October – bright and summery - with things like reading on the lawn and running in the park. Monday put a dramatic end to that, and the sky on Tuesday resumed its customary shade of sickly grey. Fortuitously enough, that Tuesday’s exploration of the Courtauld Gallery began with Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe (Lunch on the Grass) and descended into Auerbach’s Head of Leon Kossoff.
Even without Impressionism in bold on the wall adjacent, Le Déjeuner imparts a dreaminess – the play of transient light and soft convergence of colour, the small clustered paint strokes. In this initial minute of looking, my internal conversation with Roger Fry on the revelatory potential of formal arrangement is interrupted by the awareness of Gaugin’s Nevermore in my periphery. My mother has a picture book of Gaugin that, despite her tendency to update décor every few months, stayed out on the living room coffee and side tables throughout my childhood (and does into today). Perhaps my recent inclination toward him is nostalgic.
My group folds onto the floor for an exercise in thumbnail sketching, which, though I am focused on replicating Manet’s exact number of trees (perhaps even, exact number of leaves), I am equally eager to abandon in favour of Nevermore. “It wasn’t the primitive paradise Gaugin imagined…” even seeps its way into my free-writing, the guide’s spiel fueling what’s become a free-rant about men in stately rooms with fireplaces and the sexualization of primitivism.
The final, contextual approach to Manet is a pleasant surprise – he’s more transgressive than I had assumed. The jury of the 1863 Salon rejected Le Déjeuner, and when the painting elicited shock at the Salon de Refusés, Manet nicknamed it La Partie Carrée (A sexual foursome). Cheeky.
Vincent Van Gogh - Self-Portrait With A Bandaged Ear (1889)
After some time with Nevermore (I’m fond of Poe too – who could ignore the intertextuality?), I wander to Van Gogh’s Self Portrait with a Bandaged Ear. He supposedly exacted his infamous self-mutilation after an argument with Gaugin, so the transition seems natural. As a preteen, I had a 3D puzzle (which, I think, came from a Christmas stocking) of another of Van Gogh's 1889 Self Portraits – I spent a lot of time matching those shades of blue swirl, exact angles of his gaunt face or hairs of red beard. This one is visceral - at minimal distance, the mania seeps through the orange and yellow blush of his cheeks. I think about the mad genius Van Gogh, standing at this very distance to the canvas with his freshly maimed and dressed ear, ready brush in hand (or mouth).
Two galleries over, Degas’ Woman at a Window is visually arresting – the deep copper blend of paint thinner and drained oils, the almost spectral featureless silhouette. Context again intensifies meaning – “…the artist Walter Sickert recounted that this work was painted around the time of the siege of Paris by the Prussians. Degas gave the model a hunk of meat as payment, ‘which she fell upon, so hungry was she, and devoured it raw.’” Another mad man, another sad time.
Edgar Degas - Woman At A Window (1871-72)
Frank Auerbach - Head of Leon Kossoff (1957)
I wind my way up, past Peter Paul Rubens and Maurice de Vlaminck and old friend Walter Sickert, and stop at Head of Leon Kossoff – I can’t imagine that anyone ignores Head of Leon Kossoff. All the isolation and torment in the gallery converge here in haunting charcoal, in the downward glance, in the tears where Auerbach has ferociously scratched the paper to nothing, in the patchwork solution over Kossoff’s forehead, in the black scratch of lines that characterize his face.
Back down into labyrinthine basements and out into the cold, somber afternoon.