by Jean Frémon
(trnsl. from the French by John Taylor)

The daylight is fading. The cold steady light in the studio is warmed by a point of red that is the reflection, on the building across the way, of a setting sun that does not move across the northern bay window. A little emotion at the end of the day. A cordial. The flask is stashed away in the cupboard. Half a glass, no more. The painter is satisfied with his day’s work. He looks at the painting in progress. Now he has it in hand, knows where it is going. The double black lines, a red rectangle upper left, another one lower right. The struggle between background and figure, mutually cancelling each other out; the victory of surface, vibration, and rhythm. On his table, he lines up the paintbrushes and larger brushes that he has properly washed out. Taking care of things Dutch-style. Regretfully, he tosses his pencil shavings into the stove.

He has always felt tenderness for those thin wooden corollas, lined with a graphite or colored border, which form lovely little improvised bouquets in the bluish China cup receiving them. They make him think of those offerings made in Bali with three frangipani flowers floating on a little water.

Every morning he carefully sharpens the pencils used the day before and observes how these small serrated garlands take shape. He strives not to shatter them too early, and to this end he turns the pencil delicately in the orifice of the sharpener. Given that this is practically his first act every morning, this little ritual has slowly but surely taken on a superstitious charge. A promising day is announced if he manages to completely sharpen a pencil in a single continuous movement and obtain a beautiful, several-centimeter-long corolla. The day’s work will be illumined accordingly. He has a particular affection for sharpening yellow pencils, which remind him of the lemon peels sticking up from tablecloth folds in those still lifes, painted by Dutch masters, that he liked to look at in the Rijksmuseum when he was a teenager.

He often used to muse about adopting for a drawing motif those little wood shavings that blossomed every morning on his table and, in the evening, ended up crackling in the stove for an instant before they vanished. But he would counter his inner self, which would ardently wish to give itself over to this futile exercise, by the unwavering veto of exacting rigor that had guided him ever since he had definitively opted for Vermeer’s pure light and Saenredam’s austere architectures, relegated to the small lateral rooms of the museum, instead of the virtuosity of the still-life painters with their sumptuous pièce-montée-like bouquets and their tables loaded down with hares, woodcocks, and copper cauldrons.

From that day on, he looked differently at the natural environs whenever he went outside to paint sur le motif. It was no longer trite cows on the edge of water that he chose to depict, but a tree, a dune, a lighthouse, simple structures that he would keep reducing to their rudiments until the unknown light enrapturing him seeped out of them.

His clothing style and physical appearance also changed. He had shaved off his prophet’s beard and had his long hair trimmed and impeccably combed back. The knot of his tie or sometimes his sober-colored bowtie was less showy, his suitcoat was kept buttoned top to bottom, and his frameless lorgnon rounded out his serious, determined look. Little by little, he had completely given up trees, dunes, lighthouses, and even, with a tearful eye for Saenredam, church facades. Now he was totally focused on right angles, black lines, and rectangles in primary colors. The prestige of orthogonality, the nobility of pure colors, good riddance to shadows and pseudo-depths mimicking relief; surface was accepted with no fear of platitude—a painting is not an illusion but a fact. Every morning, he repeated these articles of faith to himself, elaborating them for his own use and taking care not to deviate from them, as if he were definitively convincing himself of their validity.

However, he did authorize himself to relax from time to time by painting, usually in watercolors, one or two arum lilies at the end of their long stems or, indeed, the big curly head of a chrysanthemum. He was never even slightly inclined to paint a bouquet of flowers. A bouquet—how stupid, how vulgar! Whereas a flower, a single flower, like a figure, a being that stands out from a background. . . Two flowers sometimes, like a dialogue, a union, but no more than that. He would slip the stem into the neck of the bottle so that it would remain upright. He would not paint the bottle, only the flower with a little of its stem, like a bust portrait.

A single flower, chosen for its beauty, in one of those long narrow-necked vases called laledans—this is how Turks displayed tulips. It was quite an art. Imported by a Flemish ambassador for the Hapsburgs in Suleiman’s court, the tulip had become the Huguenot flower. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the map of tulip-growing followed the resettling of emigrants driven out of France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

“Flower portraits”—this is what he liked to call these little relaxations. It was also an ancient tradition in this country of merchants who, after renouncing the adoration of Mary and the saints, after whitewashing frescoes in churches, after shattering statues and burning paintings, had unconsciously transferred their mystical zeal onto the innocent tulip adorned with all the charms of the Orient. In order to give support to their fruitful commerce, speculating gardeners would hire the trendiest painters, paying them very well, to use watercolors to produce attractive catalogues of the most beautiful tulip varieties. The bulbs were sold at very high prices and would pass from hand to hand a dozen times before they had even bloomed.

Every morning, Piet Mondrian took an intense delight in choosing a few flowers from the market that extended along the canal. He feverishly brought them back home, placing them in bottles in front of the windows but no longer looking at them until evening. It sufficed to know that they were there, while he indulged in orthogonality during the day. When evening came, he would sometimes turn towards those flowers, which seemed to await him silently, and, with the point or the flat part of a fusain, he would try his luck at rendering the creamy white corolla of an arum lily.

This pleasure was not without some vague remorse. Contrition belonged to his personal make-up. Moreover, those flowers—those flower portraits—above all sold well, assuredly much better than did the austere, ambitious paintings to which he had assigned the mission of defending his name for all eternity. One doesn’t refuse, he would say to himself, a little money to keep firewood burning in the stove.

The painter would only sparingly allow himself these guilty pleasures of curves and shapeliness, this fascination for illusion, these enticements of modest earnings and public recognition limited to his neighborhood: he painted no tulips, regretfully because of their pure form and the sensuality with which they drooped at the end of the day. Tulips too strongly evoked that speculative insanity surely inspired by the devil who had one day taken control over his country. No tulips, but roses, chrysanthemums, arum lilies. . .

And never did he resolve to sketch his pencil shavings in the China cup. Throughout his lifetime, he limited himself to affectionately admiring them before, contrite, he handed them over to the purifying flames of his stove.

-From Rue du Regard, Paris: Éditions P.O.L., 2012.

Jean Frémon, born in 1946, is a French novelist, poet, art critic, and the president of the Galerie Lelong. Many of his books are noted for the engaging ways in which they blend history, art criticism, ekphrasis, and fictional narrative. Several of his works have appeared in English translation and other languages, most recently Portrait Tales (published by Les Fugitives in London and translated by John Taylor).

John Taylor’s most recent translations include Franca Mancinelli’s All the Eyes that I Have Opened (Black Square Editions), Philippe Jaccottet’s La Clarté Notre-Dame & The Last Book of the Madrigals (Seagull Books), and two books by Pascal Quignard: The Unsaddled and Dying of Thinking (also Seagull Books).