FOR H
Baudelaire said
The more man cultivates the arts
the less he gets hard.
O’ how I’d love for you
to leave yourself
and come to me.
There are mornings spent
with you in the room
light pouring through
the gold velvet curtains—
The rest can be thrown to the dogs.
The female figure in Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre stands naked, holding a cloth, looking over the male figure’s shoulder. The male figure is supposedly a self portrait—of Courbet, by Courbet—and he is painting a landscape. There are trees and a sky and some shrubbery. Everything is happening in the present tense; she is watching him paint. That is to say, the painting unfolds before her. As viewers, we look at her watching Courbet paint. He is ignoring her. This is how it feels to be in love with an artist.
H thinks about God knows what then goes to her studio and casts a large star from silver, polishes it with a felt wheel and a red rouge polishing compound until she can see her reflection in it. When she gets home at two in the morning she wakes me up and says I want to put the star in a show and the next morning someone contacts her saying Have you got anything to put in the show? And she thinks of the silver star and then it goes in the show. By the time she lays the star flat on the floor of the gallery and people say they like it (because they are encouraged to walk both around it and on top of it; they find this funny and smart) she has already started thinking of the next thing. She scans old postcards she found at a bookstore in Berlin. She will use them, somehow. She silk screens something then paints into it using stencils, with oil paints, I think, creating veils and so fourth and so on, Jaspar Johns style. It never ends, the thinking and the making. I wait for her at home.
I wonder if it will be like this forever, until we split, or until she dies, or until I die, and I’m no longer around to witness it.
I find her commitment to her practice impressive but it leaves me feeling lonely. More often than not I arrive home from work and she is not there—she is at her studio. I wish that she would come home early and have sex with me, then take me to the café for a drink or two, then take me home to bed, where we would have sex again, smoke a cigarette then sleep. This was more or less the way the evenings unfolded when we first moved in together; she would only ever work for as long as I would—six to eight hours during the day. Things were different back then. Now she needs to work more.
Baby, I need to work more.
Was what she had said to me after she finished making the star and I suggested that the following day she come home early from the studio so we could spend the evening together.
Around the same time as the silver star and the postcards she became obsessed with pediments, namely the one surmounting the portico of the Panthéon. We live in the 11th arrondissement, so it is not far from our apartment. She visited it daily, walking, or taking the 86 bus if she was too tired to walk or if it was raining too heavily. She likes that it depicts a central figure who reigns over all the others.
It represents civil order.
Was what she told me.
The central figure dangles crowns made of leaves and the people reach for them. She has something they all want; they hang around her knees and feet. They are desperate and she is nonchalant. There is nothing civil about it.
H paints the word “Pediment” in cursive in silver on a white 188x127cm canvas. The silver is so silver that it is almost reflective, and causes the lettering to appear three-dimensional.
Then came the caryatids, because she watched Agnès Varda’s Les Dites Cariatides (1984) late one night with her friend Léa in her studio.
Then came…
Then came…
Then came…
I visited the Musée d'Orsay and viewed Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre for the first time in February, not long after H and I had first met. I saw the naked female figure as Courbet’s supportive girlfriend. I thought: she watches him work and she enjoys it; it is sweet that he wants her there. He is not cruel to her, for he permits her studio access and gives her something to look at. H had once said to me:
When I was dating Anaïs she would come to the studio and watch me work. She would read, sometimes, but mostly just sit there and watch. She loved it.
I don’t like thinking about H and Anaïs because H loved Anaïs and Anaïs supposedly loved H back. Anaïs was from London. H has never granted me studio access.
Visiting the Musée d’Orsay two months after H and I had started living together, I saw Courbet in L’Atelier du peintre as being cruel, precisely because he is working and she is there. She is waiting for him to finish. Perhaps she wants to kiss, or perhaps she is hungry or thirsty and would like to go to the café with him—but they don’t. He works; he does not look at her. It is happening in the present tense.
In a Youtube video posted by the Musée d’Orsay in 2020, poet Ariana Reines says the female figure in L’Atelier du peintre is representative of Courbet’s desires—what he really thinks of when he works. The female figure is hovering, always present. Ariana says that this is what it feels like to work; that the work itself may have nothing to do with your erotic preoccupations, but still they are there. Reines is less cynical than I; I don’t see it like this. I’d like to believe that if the presence of the female figure was truly felt by Courbet, if what Reines is saying is true, the canvas on which he paints would depict her, standing nude, looking down at him, holding the cloth.
There is always something else to be cast in silver. There is always something else to paint. Ma vie est belle quand tu es là is the title of the latest group show in which H will appear. She begins working on something which she says she cannot articulate yet, though she does rather succinctly, talking about intentions without actually talking about the way the work will manifest as a physical object. She explains: she will make something that serves as a spin off of Sylvie Fleury’s spin off of Carl André’s 144 Tin Square (144 carrés d’étain) (1975). Everything must be silver except for that which is not. Thirteen of Fleury’s makeup palettes crushed on top of it—pinks and yellows and blues. A hairbrush, maybe—a silver hairbrush. Cleaning out the hairbrush on André—filming this. Blonde hair. Léa is blonde. She will use Léa’s hair.
H sits on the couch and watches Sylvie Fleury’s Walking on Carl Andre (1997) on repeat from eleven o’clock at night until two in the morning. I don’t bother asking her to come to bed.
Video.
Twenty four minutes and forty seconds.
Colour.
Sound.
Collectors in Geneva allowed women to walk in heels on their own André sculptures and Fleury recorded it. The work was an act of retaliation, too, because André had previously had Fleury’s works about his works removed from galleries. André has no sense of humour—he is also a murderer. H thinks life is better with Fleury’s work in it, hence why she will make a piece about her for the show.
Ma vie est belle quand Fleury est là.
She says. Her work will be titled: Sylvie, Je T’aime.
H is working even in her dreams. She recounts:
Last night I dreamt that I was in the studio and Léa came to see me. She tripped over her suit pants because they were too long and she fell. She grabbed onto something, a bucket of paint that was sitting on one of the tables as an attempt to stabilise herself but it didn’t work and she continued to fall. The paint was orange. You know how much I hate orange. And it went flying everywhere. All my shit was ruined. And for some reason I was working with stone. I had made these big stone sculptures and she smashed them all when she fell. I think I’ll make a video about this. Like Fleury’s video of the car crushing the makeup…
I feel like a limitation to H, to her practice. Ghislaine Leung in Bosses (2023) writes of limitations: what are they, and what do we choose to label as such? ‘Maybe they are just things I care about? Without which I would perish.’ I give the book to H. She thanks me, says she will read it later. She walks out of the door of the apartment and goes to her studio.
Page from Ghislaine Leung's Bosses (2023), published by Divided Publishing.
Alex Seltzer wrote a piece about Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre for Artforum titled Gustave Courbet: All the world’s a studio. It teaches me that Courbet takes from the world around him then goes to his studio and ignores everything but one thing, and it is that one thing which he chooses to paint. In the case of L’Atelier du peintre, he paints that which is not in front of him, that which is not there. Picasso once said to Gilot, about a painter he was teaching: ‘Someone brings him a girl and what does he draw? A line.’ I moved to Paris to be with H. What does she paint? The word “Pediment” in silver on a white canvas. When Courbet painted L'Origine du monde (1866), he was probably looking at a tree.
Baudelaire is depicted by Courbet in L’Atelier du peintre, too. He is seated in a corner and appears to be reading. He is just a cruel as Courbet—head bent downwards into the paper, eyes following suit. He ignores that which is happening around him; he focuses on his work.
I am almost certain that Courbet saw himself as being free, seperate from the happenings of the world around him. This is why, in the self portrait, he paints the landscape, not the woman, the dog, or the young boy. Why is it that we see freedom as individuality? Being able to separate oneself from the happenings of the world around them—a kind of turning away. Leung in Bosses (2023) writes against this: ‘I am free with support, not without’. I want H to let me support her, to let me help her be free. I want her to work less. I want her to turn to me.
Baudelaire writes: ‘I am consumed by a desire to paint the woman who appeared to me so rarely and who so quickly fled, like a beautiful regretted thing the voyager leaves behind as he is carried away into the night’ (The Desire to Paint). Maybe H does not turn to me, does not paint me, precisely because I am there.
At the opening night of the show Ma vie est belle quand tu est là, H’s work, Sylvie, Je T’aime, receives high praise. It is described as real, funny and touching; a love letter to Fleury. I stand behind her while she converses with a gallerist from New York. They request that she moves there, for it would only be a pain for her to have to ship her work from Paris all the time. I can see H considering. I finish my drink—time passes. She does not turn to look at me.
Still from Sylvie Fleury’s Walking on Carl Andre (1997).
