The Collected Prose Read online

  The romantic Mr. Fromentin spins out meditations about lofty things, history, beauty, fame. I, however, with all the force of my spirit cling to the brick. Never yet has this angular object awakened in me such fascination and fever to find out more about it.

  Dusk is falling, the last acrid, Egyptian yellows go out, cinnabar becomes gray and fragile, the last fireworks of the day grow dark. All of a sudden there is an unexpected pause, a short-lasting interval in the darkness as if somebody in a hurry opened the door from a light room to a dark room. It happens as I sit on a bench several yards from the back wall of the Ridderzaal, the Knights’ Hall. For the first time I have the impression that the Gothic wall is like a fabric: perpendicular, taut, without any decorations, tightly woven with thick yarn and a narrow, stringy, pithy warp. The scale of colors is contained between ochre and umber with caprate added. The tint of the bricks is not uniform. From time to time a fawn-brown appears like a half-baked roll or the color of a fresh, crushed cherry, then again a mysterious violet covered with glaze. Instructed by the Knights’ Hall, I start to appreciate the old, warm, close-to-the-earth brick.

  During all my daily pacing of the street pavements and museum parquet floors, a tantalizing thought never leaves me: that my wanderings will be sterile if I do not manage to reach the interior, the inside of Holland untouched by the human hand and identical with what was looked at by my collective hero, the Dutch bourgeois of the seventeenth century. Only then could we exist in the same frame, against an eternal landscape.

  The advertisements of the tourist agencies are banal and without imagination, the schedules of bus offices deprived of taste like the dinners of railway-station restaurants.

  I wait thus for pure chance; and chance appears under the seductive name Valley of the River Lek and River Vlist.

  The valley is like a bowl, and so green, black-green and violet-green, that everything becomes steeped in this thick damp color. Only the River IJssel retains its ashy color, like a flag of sovereignty before it drowns in the immensity of other waters.

  On the left side of the road leading to Rotterdam, a herd of motionless windmills. This is the only view I take with me on the journey like a talisman.

  Thus I am in Holland, the kingdom of things, great principality of objects. In Dutch, schoon means beautiful and at the same time clean, as if neatness was raised to the dignity of a virtue. Every day from early morning a psalm of washing, bleaching, sweeping, carpet beating, and polishing hovers over the whole land. What has disappeared from the surface of the earth (but not from memory), what the ramparts of attics have protected is found in five regional museums with fairy-tale names: Ede, de Lutte, Apelddoorn, Lievelde, Marssum, Helmond. One can find there hundred-year-old coffee grinders, kerosene lamps, machines for drying marshes and irrigating fields, shoes for weddings and every day, instructions for polishing diamonds and forging harpoons, models of grocery stores, tailor shops, pastry shops, recipes for baking and holiday cakes, a drawing representing a huge shark on an ocean beach, and three ominous meteors.

  I ask myself: why precisely in this country are a great-grandmother’s bonnets, a cradle, a great-grandfather’s frock coat made from Scottish wool, and a spinning wheel preserved with special care, an almost religious attention? The attachment to things was so great that pictures and portraits of objects were commissioned as if to confirm their existence and prolong their lives.

  In numerous Renaissance and baroque pamphlets the Dutch appeared invariably as money-grubbers, penny-pinchers obsessed with the desire to possess. But true wealth was rare. It was limited almost exclusively to the regents, those who traditionally occupied the highest state and provincial offices. The Calvinist church did not advocate general poverty, it was only against ostentatiousness in clothes, delights of the table, and magnificent carriages. Luckily a number of ways existed to alleviate a conscience tormented by an excess of worldly possessions—for instance, founding poor-houses for children and old people—which led to a social system without equal in the world.

  Money could be reason for pride. In his funereal epitaph the respectable merchant Isaac Le Maire passes over his virtues and good deeds but mentions (it might seem not very elevated for a voice from beyond the grave) a fortune he leaves behind of 150,000 guldens.

  WE ARE NOW DRIVING north but cannot see the North Sea; it is concealed by a dike several yards high and the color of sand. Below, at a distance of many miles, an incredible movement: trucks, bulldozers, people who look as if they were putting foundations under the Tower of Babel. In fact it is polder, retrieved from the sea bottom and dried, a new piece of land on which houses will stand in a year, with a lush meadow and majestic cows.

  HOLLAND IS A YOUNG country—on a geological scale of course (postdiluvian). In fact it was a delta, a powerful mixture of the elements of earth and water: the Schelde, the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Waal. The old maps clearly show how the sea pitilessly encroached upon the land with powerful thrusts in the north as well as in the western provinces of Zeeland and Holland.

  In a letter to Germaine de Staël Benjamin Constant8 wrote, “This brave nation lives with all that it possesses on a volcano, the lava of which is water.” This has not a word of exaggeration. It could be said that throughout its history Holland lost more people as a result of floods than during all its wars. Even taking into consideration the tendency of old chroniclers to exaggerate, the balance sheet is grim. The huge north bay of Zuider Zee was the result of a natural disaster that took fifty thousand human lives. In the eighteenth century, thirty-five floods were registered. One could prolong almost endlessly the list of these cemeteries without gravestones. Water attacked also the great cities of Haarlem. Amsterdam, and Leyden; when in 1421 the ring closed around Dordrecht, one could see from its tower only a desert of water, without a single living soul.

  The systematic struggle with flood disasters started at the turn of the sixteenth century. It was the work of excellent artisans and engineers, not to mention self-taught geniuses. Jan Leeghwater9 undoubtedly belonged to their number, and thanks to his works he achieved the somewhat exaggerated nickname of the Dutch Leonardo da Vinci. The range of his interests was indeed Renaissance-like: he built a city hall in De Rijp, he sculpted and did some painting, his works in metal, wood, and ivory enjoyed great popularity. He constructed ordinary as well as musical clocks and a huge number of machines to dry the soil.

  Leeghwater thought that the addition of witchcraft and mystery could not harm science but on the contrary might help it. He organized shows to which he invited an elite audience. In France in the presence of Prince Maurice10 he demonstrated a machine in the shape of a bell: he let himself be drowned in the machine, and under water wrote a psalm taken from the Bible, fortified his body with a few pears, then appeared to the court whole, healthy, and bursting with energy.

  AFTER SEVERAL DAYS I grew accustomed to the thought that I would not see the views painted by the Dutch masters of the “Golden Age.” In Italy it is enough to lean out the train window to see a fragment of Bellini flash in front of your eyes, or the sky of Umbria as it was registered ages ago. In Holland I found instead the largest collection of landscapes that were contained in frames. The Flamand Patinir11, who painted in the sixteenth century, shone like a guiding star: a master of spaces built from perpendicular screens and brown, green, and blue perspectives. Then came others; constellations and hierarchies kept changing. The fabulous mannerists van Coninxloo12 and Seghers13, simple-hearted Avercamp14, Cuyp15, Potter16, the painter of the apotheosis of artiodactylus, Hobbema17, and De Momper18, to mention only a few of my favorite landscape painters.

  The knowledge I received in school—it is well known that this is a bundle of correct facts as well as dogmatic idiocies—left me with the conviction that the greatest landscape painter was Jacob Ruysdael19. “Toward the end of the seventeenth century at a time when painters specialized in specific thematic genres, this landscape painter with an unusual personality, knowledge, and insatiable
curiosity recorded in his works in a matchless manner the indissoluble union of water, land, and sky characteristic of the Dutch landscape. No one else was able to show in such a moving way the mutual harmony of atmospheric values and the shape of clouds.”

  This tirade of a well-known scholar, more inspired than lucid, raises Ruysdael to the rank of cherubim. In the words of the illustrious though unrestrained art historian, the painter becomes an archangel. I was faithful to him for so many years, and continued to revere his epic canvases, calm, painted from a perspective of the dunes where one can see spreading meadows, stripes of white linen on them, and on the horizon the respectable city of Haarlem with the powerful Church of Saint Bavo, wings of windmills glimmering in the sun. Above it all the huge sky (its relation to the land one to four). I always worshiped Ruysdael; but as a guide through old, provincial Holland, I chose Jan van Goyen20.

  I would still like to say why my feelings for Ruysdael cooled. Well, it happened when spirit began to enter his canvases and everything became “soulful,” every leaf, every broken branch, drop of water. Nature was sharing our own anxieties and sufferings, transitoriness and death. For me nature that lacks compassion is the most beautiful: a cold world in another world.

  THREE LARGE, LOW-LYING RIVERS with their tributaries, thousands of brooks and streams, a huge drainage of water called the Haarlem Lake, all this created favorable conditions for communication. Highways shaded by trees were often built next to the canals, from Delft to The Hague, from Leyden to Amsterdam; they met with general approval and pride. William Temple, the English ambassador at The Hague for a long time, maintained that the road from Scheveningen to The Hague (barely a few kilometers) could be ranked with “the work of the Romans,” which was an exaggeration.

  The situation changed with the seasons. The public stage-coach, introduced in the middle of the seventeenth century, had four wheels but no springs, causing an unbearable jolting of travelers; the whole vehicle dragged behind it clouds of dust that covered everything. The Estates General imposed a normalized set of wheels on vehicles, which was reasonable; they also strengthened the highway police, especially in forested terrain. Brigands caught red-handed were punished on the spot and without trial. Huygens21, a statesman, humanist, poet, and sensitive man, did not like to waste his time even when traveling—riding along the bank of the Rhine, he counted the imposing number of fifty gallows on a road less than twenty kilometers long. This was his contribution to the statistics of verdicts that were carried out.

  The car creaks, squeaks, rolls with difficulty on a hummock of land—the light is now like honey—one more curve, on the left a cluster of birches strongly bent toward the canal’s water heavy with browns and shadowy greens, the smell of slime and rotting tree trunks. On the right something that with a great dose of fantasy might be called a farm: a house with plaster peeling from its walls, the roof a hundred-year-old map of storms, a tall brick chimney like a turret repelling the last assault. What country is it? Whose domain? What is the name of the ruler?

  Setting out with my favorite landscape painter, Jan van Goyen, I was not sure whether we would ride a highway on land or a road of the imagination. Van Goyen painted a number of so-called “Village Lanes,” and we have tried to describe one of these. The outline is simple, beginning at the base of the painting: a narrow canal, a sandy sprawling road, a shed or something that once upon a time was a house and today is a picturesque ruin, a few scrawny trees, and a goat, the heraldic animal of poverty.

  All this elicits many questions. Where did the enthusiasts for this subject matter come from in prosperous Holland? Were there any such alleys of poverty in the country? (My guide, Jan van Goyen, completely convinces me with the magic of his art.) Where do the true Troy and Eliot’s Wasteland exist?

  A road through a village, a ferry floating down the river, a hut among dunes, clusters of trees and haystacks, travelers waiting for a ride—these are the typical subjects of van Goyen’s paintings. Canvases with no anecdote, loosely composed, flimsy and slim, with a weak pulse and nervous outline, they quickly leave their imprint on the memory. The eye assimilates them without any resistance, and they remain on the retina for a long time. When I first saw van Goyen’s painting I felt I had waited a long time for just this painter, that he filled a gap in the museum of my imagination I had sensed for a long time. It was accompanied by an irrational conviction that I knew him well and forever. From where did van Goyen take the themes of his can-vases? Sometimes it can be determined without difficulty on the basis of the fragments of the architecture he represents.

  In the large painting in the Museum of Art History in Vienna we easily recognize the churches and towers of Dordrecht on great, gray water cut by waves shaped like half-moons and regular as ornaments. But in the beautiful painting in Munich’s Pinakotheka, “View of Leyden,” the painter moved the Church of Saint Pancras outside the city, placing it on a peninsula surrounded by water on both sides. The old, intricate Gothic church towers above a group of fishermen, shepherds, and cows on the far shore of an imaginary landscape. Often the topography of his works is unclear: somewhere beyond the dune, on the shore of some river, at the turn of a road, on a certain evening…. It was said the master had the cheapest elementary props in his atelier you can imagine: clay, brick, lime, pieces of plaster, sand, straw. From these leftovers, rejected by the world, he created new worlds.

  In his middle period van Goyen painted a number of excellent monochromatic works dominated by bistre, sepia, and heavy green. The Dutch did not invent the method of painting with a single color but endowed it with grace and naturalness, because monochromatism is an accurate epitome of visible reality, a rendering of sheen and atmosphere (a blue-gray glow a moment before a storm, the light of summer afternoons heavy with lazy gold).

  This great painter managed his talent very poorly. He was an appreciated, prolific artist, but the fact that he sold his paintings for the beggarly price of five to twenty-five guldens barred his chances of a serious career. No one with self-respect, unless constrained to do so, would sell his canvases for a price only slightly higher than the cost of materials.

  He started to learn his profession very early, as a ten-year-old boy: he changed his masters five times, finally entering the atelier of Esaias van de Velde22, not much older than himself and creator of excellent landscapes that seem washed by rain.

  Van Goyen did not settle down in a single place. He led a rather nomadic life, traveled to Germany and England, and returned with portfolios of sketches. His drawings are quick, impressionistic, and without many details, executed as if with a single stroke of the pencil not lifted from the paper. He always preferred a narrow palette of complementary colors to a painting constructed from many contrasts; in this sense he remained a monochromatic painter to the end.

  When he was almost forty-five he settled down in The Hague, which did not in the least mean financial stability. So he had tried everything.

  He did not lack ideas. He traded the paintings of his colleagues, organized auctions, speculated on houses and land and also the wretched tulips.

  The result of these commercial acrobatics was a double bankruptcy and death in debts. His malicious contemporaries maintained that his only favorable transaction was matrimonial; he married his daughter to a shrewd and canny inn-keeper, the painter Jan Steen.

  What emerges from fog and rain, what is reflected in a drop of water? Jan van Goyen’s “Landscape of Objects” is in the Dahlem Museum, a painting so small it can be covered by the hand. But it is neither a notation, a sketch, nor a trial version for a larger work; it is a full-blooded painting, self-contained, with a composition as simple as a chord. From the grayness of sky and earth emerges a clump of osiers whose fingerlike leaves are painted with a juicy dark green. From time to time among the thickets, a small yellow accent. The picture does not hang from a wall. This shred of the world was placed in a glass case, to make one bow over it.

  OFTEN AFTER MY VACATIONS I listened to co
nversations in which the light of faraway countries was praised. But what really is the light for which artists in the past would leave their native towns, found artists’ communities, profess a solar cult, and pass into history as the school from N? What is the light of Holland, so luminous for me in the paintings but absent in immediate surroundings? I decided once to devote a whole day to meteorological studies. In the morning the weather was nice but the sun seemed suspended in an opaque, viscous liquid similar to a soft light bulb, without a trace of a l’azzurro. The clouds appeared and quickly disappeared. Exactly at one-thirty in the afternoon it suddenly cooled off, and in half an hour torrential, heavy-grained, dark-blue rain began. It struck with fury against the ground and seemed to be returning to the sky to fall with greater implacability. It lasted about an hour. Exactly at seven in the evening I left for Scheveningen to pursue my studies further. The rain had already stopped. Piles of clouds all over the west. The resort, the cabins, the casino now dazzlingly white were covered with a coating of violet. A moment before eight everything changed: a staggering festival began, of water vapor, forms, colors, metamorphoses difficult to describe because even the evening sun sent out frivolous pinks and farcical gold.

  The spectacle finished. The sky was clear. The wind stopped. Faraway lights went on and off, and all of a sudden without warning, without a breeze or anticipation, a huge cloud the color of ash appeared, a cloud in the shape of a god torn apart.

  THE PRICE OF ART

  Was macht die Kunst?

  Die Kunst geht nach Brot.

  Dass muss sie nicht, dass soll sie nicht.