Me, Myself, Monet: 14. The Universal Exposition


Paris, 1855

Mamma and I took a four-horse omnibus to the Universal Exposition, just off the Champs Elysées. The Emperor had built his giant Palace of Industry there, stretching over a space bigger than the Bassin du Commerce, where ships docked near our shop; there were huge arches of cast iron holding glass panels where smoke gathered, rising off the dandies and the crowd and the dust inside. 

In this vast hall, women were feeling the brocaded curtains, emblazoned with a big N, for our Napoleon, the Third.  We were blocked by three top-hatted men admiring some new British plows; another cluster of bourgeois were joking about peasant weavers throwing their wooden sabots into these new machines for making cloth. 

For Papa, I made mental notes about the all-metal spinning jennies, the machine looms, some equipment for making Portland cement, a new coal-fired steam engine, a chemical apparatus to make bleaching powder. 

Then neither I nor Mamma could stand the noise and the exhibits from so many other countries, so we snuck out to the Fine Arts Building.  

My mood changed.  Before, I had been lollygagging along.  Now I had a mission.  1600 paintings, according to the one-franc pamphlet.  I had already read in Papa’s paper that the Emperor and the Academy decided that the exposition would highlight Delacroix and Ingres, our twin stars, to put down the British, who didn’t even have a pavilion for art.  But of course the critic was torn between allegiances; Ingres, the master of line, and Delacroix, the colorist who brought to life Liberty leading the people in revolution, bare breasted, with a worker in a smock, and a bourgeois in a black suit, right behind her.  What would it be, line or color?

A few dozen crinolines and black suits were bunched up around a small picture by Ernest Meissonier, The Brawl.  I had heard that when the Emperor had come on Varnishing Day, he had picked this one as his favorite. Tiny little brushstrokes, each as precise as the coiled wire inside a watch.  Fancy costumes.  A good fight. “So much work,” said one matron, leaning in with her lorgnette as if to see the threads on the pants of one of the two men being held back from a fight. Clearly, the public liked to see that an artist who put in a lot of effort—for the bourgeoisie, I thought, art should not seem too easy.

We set a brisk pace, tilting forward, Mamma pushing past the crowds that clumped around the sprawling nudes, and the giant canvases with Napoleon and half his cavalry, or Charlemagne, or a troubador entertaining some medieval court, with a cast of 50.  We stopped at the Daubignys, beautiful soft landscapes, clearly not as important as these giants of history…she sighed, and when I teased her, she admitted that she still had a fondness for him, from the days before she married Papa. I’ve seen the way she dusts those two small Daubigny landscapes, at home. Her own watercolors are, well, polite, even obedient, but I think when she was young she may have had a taste for adventure.

Then we came upon the Delacroix. It hit me right in the chest. I could hardly talk. I gestured to Mamma, and went up close to look.  I must have spent twenty minutes lost in that picture—Lion Hunting in Morocco.


The lion was licking his wound—I got a sense that the hunter had gotten off one shot and now lunged forward, his gun ready to come up to his shoulder, wondering whether the lion was mortally wounded, or just hurt.

Delacroix had guts—putting the upper body of the hunter in the shade, so only his Arabic pants get any light, that shock of red cloth right at the center of the painting.  And his servant is sprawled there behind the same rock, like some sailor clinging to a raft after a shipwreck—pressing to the ground—intent on the lion.  His head and shoulder, too, are in the shade.  So we get a sense of the characters’ feelings from the way they move. No grimacing, no tears, no delicate faces here.

But what an imagination! Delacroix is wrestling with light—daring to put his hero in the dark, and make the lion smaller, farther off, with a face so much clearer than the hunter, so we see how and where the lion is licking himself.  Like our cat Lisette, he is using his tongue to smooth his fur, or take the sting out of the bullet wound.  His tongue is out and in motion.  Surely Delacroix felt pity for this large cat—who gets the spotlight.  The horse is terrified.

And the tree, plunk in the middle?  Nothing much.  A standard tree.  One I could draw from a copy book.

Delacroix just did not give a damn for Monsieur Ochard’s classical balance, his ideal of even lighting everywhere, his focus on a hero, not some animal. And Delacroix didn’t care about prissy little details either.

In the foreground, he put a sword—a streak of light.  It’s there, I guess, in case the rifle misfires, or fails.  It’s beautiful, a little vague, and yet sharp enough to be dangerous. In my memory, it just keeps stabbing me.

In the next room, Ingres had a big grotesque fantasy—Homer being crowned by angel, with a crowd of other poets and painters bringing gifts. Mamma was able to guess who most people were, with the help of the catalog. I found the whole thing disgusting.




Yes, he managed to get Homer dead center, wearing a sheet, right in front of a temple, also perfectly placed between the left and the right…and then a jumble of colors around him, all discrete, nothing flashy like those red pants in Delacroix, just kind of washed out, you know, like the Renaissance murals that Monsieur Ochard used to show us in a book…I just don’t care that Ingres has inserted Michelangelo, and Poussin, and, what, a dozen playwrights and poets from Greece and Rome…this painting is an artist’s altarpiece, a collection of the saints that Ingres worships.  But why should I have to read all those poems to appreciate it?  Why should I have to go to the Louvre, and go to Italy, to spot who is who?  And why should I remember all those classics, when I look at the different costumes he has painted so carefully here, to recognize that, yes, he has borrowed this from Painter X, and that from Painter Y?  

The painting is full of lies.  He pretends to have historically accurate costumes—great.  But what the hell is Raphael doing standing there?  The whole scene is made up.  Not imaginative, like Delacroix.  Just put together like a cabinet, or a carriage, piece by piece.  And to what end?  To over-awe. To make us bow down before him, the creator of Homer. It seemed to me that Ingres was really claiming that he was the equal of all these great painters, sculptors, and poets.  He was trying on Homer’s toga.  

Monsieur Ochard used to say that all the great subjects come from reading the classics.  He said that you have to know all these literary allusions to pass the test for the Prix de Rome. If this painting is a tribute to a classical academy, then I swear I will never set foot in the School of Fine Arts. Forget the Prix de Rome: I want the price of a beer.


“Now I have to go visit a friend. I'll leave you with the Courbet,” she said, as if promising me a treat.  I was glad to get the air. I asked her where she was going, but she just smiled, and said, "You wouldn't like her.  She's a little like Madame Jouen." She led me outside, and across the Avenue Montaigne to an ugly block of a building covered with plaster, with a zinc roof, carrying an advertisement in giant black letters, like a wine seller’s shop: Pavilion of Realism.

She promised to return in time for our train back to Le Havre, and, waving happily, she walked briskly off toward the Place de la Concorde. I did not know what to do, but after a few moments watching her go, I figured what he hell. I ducked through a canvas flap, and came into a large room with a pine floor, a ticket taker on one side, and a coat room on the other…and in the back, some kind of an office, with a curtain instead of a door. I paid my one franc admission, and bought a booklet by the novelist Champfleury.  A sign said that we could buy printed reproductions.  All of this, I had read in the newspaper, was for an exhibition by one man⎯unheard of, they said, the egotism to have an entire show just of one person’s work. Was that him, laughing with friends?

This big fat man was almost shouting. Then, still laughing, he bent down, wheezing. His eyes were wet like a cow’s eyes, and he made some kind of pop-pop-pop as if he were choking. He shook with convulsions. He raised his head, then his stomach stopped rolling in and out, and as the laughter died away, he kept shaking his head as he chuckled into his beard.

That one laugh must have lasted two minutes.  His friends kept nodding, without taking alarm.  Evidently, this was how he held court.

I went over to the group, pretending to look at the ceiling.  Courbet was talking in a heavy patois, the accent of the Franche-Comté, with a little Swiss or German thrown in, and a lot of his own improvisations.  I can only give an approximation of the way he talked: “Whooay?  The Hi-day-eal?  Hay-ev you ay-ver met an angel? Orrr a may-en with a hay-lo?  How could you pay-aint that?  The Hi-day-eal.”  He pounded his meaty fist into the shoulder of the little man next to him, who had to step back for a moment, to absorb the point.  I gathered that the Ideal was taking a beating.

Courbet spotted me, and left the group. I was just standing there with my notebook, like a passenger on a ship watching a whale come up alongside.

“Ah, a young artist,” he said, motioning to me to open my notebook.  He did not even take time to shake my hand, just put the book on the ticket table, and started flipping pages, grunting, pointing, approving, skipping brusquely past some pages.  I noticed that he dismissed the studies I had made of Roman busts, but slowed down for the pictures of my friends, and my teachers.  He said, “I see that you do not like your teachers.  That’s very good.”

That gave me courage. I blurted out, “I can’t make myself follow any rules, no matter how often they tell me why I ought to.”

He clutched my hand in his.  “I could never stand school.  I fought it for years until my father finally let me free.”

“I want to quit when I turn seventeen.”

“Where do you live?”

“Le Havre….but I was born in Paris.”

“Good….good…you need to be of both worlds…I spend half the year in the Franche-Comté, then I come here to see my friends, and to sell my work.  Have you sold any of your drawings yet?”

“Yes, 60 or so portraits and some caricatures.”

“Good, good, but to make a name, you must exhibit.”  He waved at the crowd of friends, lowering his voice.  “You must have the press.  You see the tall man with the beard?  He is Nader.”

“The photographer?”

“Yes.  You must be photographed, so you are known.”

“Why?”

“If you are not going to be an academic painter, you must be a merchant.  Sell your own work.  Advertise, like a vendor of worm-killing pills, or pain tonic.”

Not quite sure what he meant, but swept up in his generous enthusiasm, I nodded.  He led me over to the other side of the space, where there were some portraits, very dark, against black and brown backgrounds. I noticed that his accent had fallen away, as if he were confiding in me.  I did not know why, but I felt as if I were now his equal, not just some young provincial, longing to be rich and famous. Something about his enthusiasm reminded me of my buddies at school; we were passing notes, almost whispering together.

“I keep some of the worst ones, to remind me where I’ve come from,” he said, pointing to an awkward picture of some kind of renaissance sculptor, sprawled uncomfortably against, what, a branch that could never have supported him, or perhaps some rock that we could not see, his head cast back, eyes closed, as if he were having some religious fit.  The part I wanted to see⎯the ground that he was sitting on⎯was too dark to make out…and then I noticed that this dandy had spread an expensive blue cloak over…a stream…without getting wet. 

“What do you think?”

“He doesn’t fit into the landscape.”  I spoke without thinking; then I put a hand over my lips, to shush myself.  But Courbet nodded.

“Exactly.  I couldn’t get him to fit in, to belong.”

The other portraits⎯really just heads looming out of darkness, with no real backgrounds, but strong light above⎯seemed much more interesting.  And they had almost no scenery, so he did not have to face the problem of making the figure fit the ground.

“Yes, that’s me, and these are my friends.  You’ll see some of them over there, by the office.”  

I spotted some resemblances between the portraits and the people standing there. Courbet pulled me along.  He seemed to be remembering what he had been like at my age, so he was talking to himself as much as to me.

“There’s nothing more difficult than portraits," he said.  "I see you have discovered that.  Women want all their wrinkles and blotches cleared away, yes?   And the men want to be painted in their Sunday clothes.  All black, no? I tell you⎯ it would be better to crank an organ on the streets than earn a living like that.  At least you would not have to compromise your principles. That's why I asked all my bohemian friends to pose for me. I knew that they could stand me making a real picture, showing what I really see.”




“Is that him?” I motioned to a thin small man with a widow’s peak, sucking on a clay pipe.  

“Yes, that’s Monsieur Baudelaire.  He’s a sometime critic, and occasionally he writes poems that I don't understand.  But he is always working at being, well, unusual.” Courbet broke down laughing.

When he recovered, I said, “You made the whole scene blurry, along with him, so that everything blends together.”

He was interested, despite my bluntness. “Yes, I tried bringing in the background…just a wall, and a desk…but even so I had trouble with the angles.  He got angry posing so long…so I told him to smoke opium, and then he was much calmer.”

“Maybe that’s the smoke in the air?”

“Yes,” he said rather casually.

“I like the white splotches and the brown ones, on his fingers.  They go together when I step back.”

“Yes, I got that from the Spaniards.  Have you been to the Spanish Museum?”

“No.”

“Go, go.”

“I hate copying."

“I have never taken a master. But I go to the Louvre, to study the tradition. I steal what I can, and then I throw the rest away." I could see that he had stumbled onto a theme that he wanted to enlarge upon.  "I am the only artist today who can express my own personality and my social environment…the real world…in an original way…not some romantic ideal, not some socialist utopia…and definitely not some academic fairyland.  The real world,” he said, as if chewing a tasty bit bread in a cheese soup.  “Now look at this.”

A canvas the size of a portrait of Napoleon, or Louis the Sun King. Ten feet by seven, I would guess.  And in there, two men, life size, working on breaking stones for the common highway.  




“I was walking home one day, in the country outside Ornans, when I stopped to watch these two men. I immediately had the idea for this picture.  I paid them to come to my studio next day and pose.”

In the distance, a sandstone bluff.  In the foreground, the stones they have broken, a pot for their lunch, tall grass, the dry bleached clay of the road.  The hillside behind them was very dark, as if a cloud were passing over, so that the older man seemed to stand in very bright light, brighter than natural.

I asked him where he was when he painted this.  “Were you outside?”

“No, I was in my studio. My grandparents had passed on, and my father redid their stables as a studio.  The window was too small, so I knocked through the wall to make it three times as big.  Now you can see just as clearly as if you were out in the street.  I painted the ceiling sky blue, too, so you feel as if you were out in the open.”

It seemed artificial to me, but I could not quite say why. Baudelaire intruded, and asked to be introduced.  Courbet asked me who I was, and in a moment, I decided to change my name. "I'm Claude Monet."

"Charles Baudelaire, the damned."

Courbet put his arm around my back, and said, "I paid them a month's wages just for posing for a few days."

Baudelaire sucked loudly on his thin clay pipe and it whistled a little. He said, “These days, we are so civilized that we have all those wonderful machines over in the Universal Exposition, and they can perform all kinds of labor.  But we are not able to liberate men like these.” 

Courbet agreed. “If you are the poorest of the poor, you are lucky to get even this kind of work, that breaks your back. You start like the young man on the left, and end up like the old man on the right.”

I spoke up, “I can see why some people say you are a Socialist.”

“No, I simply painted what I saw.  But that stirred up what the reactionaries call ‘the social question.’”

I went closer, saying, “You were trying to give us a sense of them in motion, right?…But, look, I can see from the way the younger man is balancing that basket of rocks that he is not actually moving forward or back…he is just waiting for you to finish sketching.  And the old man, too: he is holding a pose, not actually moving.  They are caught in that moment.”

Courbet began to laugh and choke at once, poking Baudelaire, "You see, out of the mouths of babes, yes, yes, what you say is right…I must get more people in motion…”

I could not be stopped. “And even though they are tied into the landscape more than that sculptor was, they still stand out…maybe because you are so good at drawing.  These lines around them, these contours make them pop out of the background, like the figures in Épinal prints.”

Courbet winced, and pulled back.  After a moment, he said, “I see what you mean.  But don’t you like those popular prints? The ones with the saints standing in front of the crude mountains, or the criminal in front of the guillotine?”

“No…I like Daumier better.”

 “Daumier is a friend of mine…he has a great eye for what you call the social question…but he has much more of a sense of humor than I do.”

I dared to put my hand on his arm, saying, “But when we came in, I saw you laughing so loud I thought you might get sick.”

“I laugh when I am with friends, but when I paint, I do not make jokes. I may attack, but I do not make people seem silly."

"I do," I admitted, "I have," thinking of my caricatures.

"You'll get that out of your system," Courbet said, nudging me toward another big canvas. “Now here is one that the critics say is ugly, dirty, vulgar.  Why is that?  This is my father, on the horse, with my sisters carrying the baskets, as they come back from the market.  We are rich peasants…my father has half a dozen vineyards, on little lots around the village, but he barely makes enough to come up with a dowry for my sisters, with a little left over so he can work on his inventions…a new kind of mechanical harvester for grapes, for example.  My mother runs the actual business.”

I was struck that Courbet could proudly call himself a peasant, and show his father in a smock, and his sisters carrying vegetables on their heads.  

“The critics said that this must be a joke, a joke in bad taste.  But this is my family.  They say I am a painter of filth, because they find nothing noble, pure, or moral in this picture.  They say I cannot invent anything.  That I have no imagination.  They call me an artisan in painting, as if I were a cabinet maker, or a shoemaker.  I know I am crude at times, but I have had the imagination to show them the truth." 

"I have trouble imagining anything.  If it isn't in front of me, the drawing goes to hell. "

He had imagined the whole scene, and put it together from bits and pieces…from his family posing for individual parts of the picture, from studies of his oxen, and horses…Imagination had assembled the pieces, and they did not quite fit together, but I still got a sense of the hard work involved in farming, and what a triumph it was to be able to come home from the market with a brace of strong oxen. I liked that he went ahead and celebrated his family, too, showing them half way between the stonebreakers and true bourgeois. I couldn't do that. I was too angry, too restless.

Courbet said, "The academy wants me to imagine angels. But what I imagine is the real."

He put his hand on my lower back, and guided me around the desk to look at a huge painting, maybe twenty four feet long, and eleven feet high; it took up most of the wall on that side of the room.   I saw forty or fifty life-size figures, stretched out across a canvas big enough for a full battle scene with the opposing armies, and their generals on horseback.  This was a history painting, all right, but it recorded a funeral in the provinces.



Baudelaire smirked, "The burial of the bourgeois ideal."

Courbet laughed.  “I did this one in Ornans, too…the studio was only a little wider than the canvas, and it was only three meters deep, so I could not get back far enough to see what it all looked like, as I was painting it.  I was groping…imagining what the overall effect would be, but until I got it in here, I couldn’t really check." 

He pointed to the figures.  "These are all my neighbors in Ornans; I had them come into my studio, one at a time, to pose. At first, they were all so proud of being painted by an artist that they wanted to hang the picture in the chapel there, but then they heard that the Paris critics thought they were ridiculous, and undignified, even ugly…so then my neighbors accused me of being a republican, and I had to hide out under my mother’s floor, after the Emperor's coup, back in 1851.”

“Is that your father in back?” I asked, thinking I recognized a resemblance.

He nodded.

“And are these your sisters again?”

I'd spotted their faces, surrounded by black, and wearing conventional attitudes of mourning, on the right.

Each face was distinct.  The panel was like one of those Greek friezes that we had on the shelves in school…but here each person was different.  Of course, because they each posed at a different time, some looked one way, some another, most were indifferent, a few pretended to be in mourning, but most were simply waiting for the sketch to be completed.  This wasn’t a real group.  

There was no general emotion, no pretense that everyone was upset, or even paying attention.  I thought again of the studio, and the fact that he could not see these people all together, at the same time, so they ended up as four dozen individual portraits, pretending to be in a procession.

And then he put everyone together in the middle, but separated them into blocks of color…all those people blending into the black, so I could not tell where one person started and another ended.  Black, the color of the bourgeois.  Black, the modern color.  Black, the plain sign of success, even in the country.

“Here your father is, well, a bourgeois,” I said.

“Yes, we float somewhere between rich peasant and poor bourgeois…and that upsets a lot of people in Paris, who like to think of the country people as simple men of the soil, pious, god fearing, attached to law and order, never getting angry or revolutionary…the way they did in 93, and then again after the coup.”

“So some of these men have made enough money to move into town, and live off their rents?”

“Yes.  For instance, here’s the notary, and here’s the prefect.  Here’s a man who charges 8% on loans for new land, and gets the hatred of men like this peasant, the gravedigger, the only peasant in this crowd.”

Baudelaire said, “So, Monsieur Courbet, you are neither peasant nor bourgeois?”

“I am both.  And I am a bohemian…that is, a vagabond…a wandering Jew.  I do not have a place to lay my head, I am always between.”

 “Every time you come to Paris, you pretend to be ignorant of Paris…but you manage to surround yourself with some of the most sophisticated dandies, strollers, artists and poets.”  He waved toward another gigantic painting, showing someone⎯ Courbet⎯painting a landscape, with a nude model admiring him.  Where was she in that landscape?  No matter.  Behind her on the right were a clutch of Parisians.  

“Yes, these are the my friends,” said Courbet. “This painting sums up seven years of my life. You see, there is Baudelaire.  And next to him…” Courbet stopped.

Baudelaire nodded at the shiny black spot.  “I asked him to eliminate my mistress.  She used to be next to me, but now she is gone.”  He did not seem embarrassed.  Rather he seemed to be challenging us.

Baudelaire talked confidentially, “Courbet holds our group together.  We are his shareholders, you could say, his investors, his coworkers…all of us who live in this bohemian world, we make a little money from art or journalism, but we refuse to be part of the giant machine.”

Courbet shook my hand, saying, "I must go." An elegant couple had just come in. He said, "Come and see me the next time you are in Paris," and hurried off.

Baudelaire, unfazed, was still looking at the painting.  “You know, this is his arcade, his panorama.  But we are not really a group.  If individual freedom is so important, as the new emperor says, we must celebrate the cult of the individual. Look who is at the center!”

Courbet had placed himself in the middle of the painting, as if directing all these members of an orchestra.  As a composition, then, totally unrealistic⎯more like one of those collections of famous playwrights, in the newspaper, or the parade of famous but dead painters and playwrights in Ingres’s homage to Homer.  But instead of famous people, or mythological beings, real people, studied in the street, or worked up in the studio.  The clothes accurate, the poses not at all grand, the faces quite precise.  

“What I do not like,” Baudelaire said, “Is the lack of imagination.”

I protested that the whole scene seemed imaginary to me.

“No, it is too accurate, in the details.  The key is to capture the inner experience.  It takes enormous imagination to convey the sensation of the experience⎯the impression.”

I nodded, puzzled but getting a vague idea of what he meant.

“Experience is sacred,” he said drawing uncomfortably close.  I could smell smoke on him.  A few visitors strolled up to the painting of the studio, and Baudelaire straightened up, as if he were an actor walking on stage.  He talked to me, but I could tell he was orating for them.

He coughed a bit, and had to hold himself up on the back of the chair.  The crowd tittered, and he grabbed my sleeve again.  Pulling me close, he said, “Don’t worry about being good—just look like you are.  I’ve made poetry out of the truth—and I will never make enough money to pay for the furniture that’s already been repossessed.  If you can, avoid rubbing their faces in their own shit, as I do.  You’ll live longer, my provincial cherub.”

I felt like telling him I was Parisian—but my clothes hung on me like a flag saying, “He is from Le Havre.”

My vanity did not let me thank him, but I nodded. I was joining a gang.

He turned back to the crowd, and said, “Gentlemen, and whores, let us review the art.”

I sat on a bench in the middle of the room, soaking up the giant paintings. I heard people complain about the size of the canvases.  “One needs something smaller to fit in an apartment.” 

I felt my heart beating hard, my fingers clenching to get ahold of a pencil, I imagined having my own space like this, and a group of friends I could look to for support, and pull together to defy the academy, the Emperor, the bourgeoisie.  I came to think that the corpse in the coffin in the provincial cemetery⎯that was Monsieur Ochard.



Suddenly I wanted to get outside, to walk along the Seine, to suck in the odor of rot and tar, the stink of horse manure along the quais. I lifted the canvas door and looked out.  It was getting on to late afternoon, so we would need to go soon.

In a few minutes, a two-horse cabriolet pulled up, and someone shouted to me.  It was Mamma. "Hurry, we don't have much time."

I clambered in, and the driver clucked to the horses. 

Mamma was out of breath.  Her cheeks were flushed. She smelled of too much perfume. I thought at first she had been drinking.  But then I smelled something I could not quite place. It took me a few blocks before my brain could say what that odd odor was. Her skin was moist with love.

Without really thinking about it, I became her noble defender, like in a Dumas novel, her musketeer.

We said nothing about her affair on the way back to the station, but I held her hand very tightly, and she mine, and I told her, with the vanity of an innocent, that I was proud of her.  She did not know what to say, shook her head, cried, laughed. Still saying nothing, she kissed my hand where it held hers. 


Sources:
  • Palais d'Industrie, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1855.
  • Delacroix, Lion Hunting in Morocco.
  • Ingres: The Apotheosis of Homer
  • Courbet: Portrait of Baudelaire
  • Courbet: The Stonebreakers
  • Courbet: A Burial in Ornans
  • Detail of the signature in Monet’s Poppy Field (Giverny) (1890–91). The Art Institute of Chicago.
The Complete Notebooks: Me, Myself, Monet
1. My First Entry
2. I was born a Parisian.
3. Drawing with Mamma
4. Gardening with Papa
5. Swimming with my Brother
6. Making Deliveries
7. Drawing in School
8. School
9. Apples
10. Running
11. Birthday Present
12. Portraits Charges
13. The Train to Paris
14. The Universal Exposition
15. The Party
16. Mamma’s Death
17. Caricatures
18. A View of Rouelles

Caution: Claude Monet was never very precise about dates, and this entry can be thought of as a kind of informed fiction.  Yes, I have channeled what he later said about his youth, and I have fleshed that out with new information about the way he grew up as an artist before the moment when he left home to enter the art world in Paris. But these passages are fiction, and his notebooks are, alas, imaginary.

 © 2015 By Jonathan Price

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