I picked a book of Balzac's short stories. Top bloke, Honore de Balzac, on the evidence of what I read of him many years ago and the picture of him here does nothing to suggest otherwise.
I was particularly taken with the story, Pierre Grassou, which in its first few pages delivered a number of observations on the industry of 'creative arts', Grassou being a painter although it all seems applicable to poetry and thus, I daresay, music and any other such enterprise.
Balzac's narrator begins by bemoaning the extension of 'the Exhibition' in the Louvre by which it has included more and more artists, the implication being that the Salon have abdicated responsibility for selecting the best and opened up to more painters than perhaps they might have,
Instead of a tournament, you have a riot; instead of a magnificent exhibition, you have a rowdy bazaar; instead of selected pictures, you have everything. What is the result? The great artist is the loser.
It reminded me of the way that so many recent poetry anthologies try to include as much as possible rather than take a view. It is difficult. To take a view would often mean an editor selecting their friends but a selection that is worthy of the name needs to be discriminating and perhaps some worthy work needs to be omitted at the same time as leaving out things that are unlikely to be regarded as more than passing fancies. I'm not convinced that Balzac's narrator here is right that the great artist is the loser because their reputation should be secure. It is the paying public who are potentially being shown things that might not have been quite the masterpieces they had hoped for.
Pierre Grassou becomes known as Fougeres because that is where he comes from, like Leonardo was from Vinci, Rembrandt was van Rijn and Doménikos Theotokópoulos was from Greece but worked in Spain and was thus known as El Greco. Painting seemed to do that at times in the past although Hockney isn't known as David Bradford. In Literature, it doesn't seem to happen quite so much. Shakespeare is not William Stratford; Larkin is not Philip Coventry and I find it is not even proven that William Dunbar was from Dunbar. But if you're ever asked in a quiz where Florence Nightingale was born then there is often a clue in the question.
Fougeres is talented but no genius. Of his living space we are told,
The whole place indicated the meticulous way of life of a small-minded man and the carefulness of a poor one.
He is a 'simple genre painter' and,
doesn't need those enormous appliances which ruin historical painters. He never thought himself gifted enough to tackle a large mural and restricted himself to work on an easel.
I couldn't help liking him at this stage. He is a mediocrity and there is no shame in that but he submits a picture to the Louvre Exhibition and it s rejected. He wouldn't be the first or last to get a rejection slip but he asks for advice on his work from an established artist and teacher and amends his work according to the advice he receives. You could think more, or less, of him for that, perhaps but the advice of Schinner, 'a man of enormous talent', is that,
you would do better to leave your paints at Brullon's shop and not make off with canvas that can be used by others. Go home early, put on a night-cap, go to bed at nine o'clock. In the morning, at ten o'clock go to an office and ask for a job, and leave the Arts.
which is very much what I would have said over and again in a job I imagined for myself a few years ago in a role assessing students for entry to Creative Writing degree courses. 'No, look, mate. By all means write poems if you enjoy it but, as far as education goes, have you noticed that there is good money to be made as a plumber'.
No disrespect to plumbers. I work in an office job myself. Balzac is showing, if only he knew, that not much has changed in between 1840 and 2014. Of course everybody wants to be a pop star, a footballer or a model but the fall out rate is alarming.
So, in brief, Fougeres manages to sell a painting to a dealer. The dealer sells it for no more than it cost to paint but then asks for three more which are then to be seen in the dealer's window,
as it were, covered with a fog; they looked like old pictures.
They are being sold as Old Masters. He gets an introduction to a bourgeois family to do three portraits, his name becomes known, he gets more commissions from the middle-class who flatter themselves that they know about art and he marries the daughter. He makes a good living doing portraits, the wily dealer has taken his cut and, really, you might think it has all worked out nicely. It has worked out as well as could be expected but,
this painter, who is a good father and a good husband, cannot rid himself of one distressing thought; the artists make fun of him, his name is a term of contempt in the studios, the journals ignore his work.
I don't know what Jack Vettriano would make of that. But, on the other hand, I have an idea what Picasso, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko might have thought.
Best of luck to all of them. I suspect that Balzac intended a satire on bourgeois taste but he has gone further into the difficult values of the art world, which remain the same, and produced a masterpiece himself.
