D H Laven on Laetitia Blauman

(edited from a lecture given in Hamburg, December 2007)

    I arrive early and pause before the dirty turquoise door, wondering whether or not to wait until the appointed time rolls by. Eventually I reach for the bell, a whole four minutes prematurely, only to find the door anticipate my movements. Opening magically before me, I am sucked into a dingy narrow corridor, like stubborn fluff up a Hoover nozzle. Two thin hands reach out of the gloom to receive my jacket, dropping it on the floor only three times before tossing it in evident frustration over a nearby stair-rail. Controlling the whole operation – in that part over-efficient, part ham-fisted manner to which I am to become accustomed - is a small, wizened old woman with a face that seems keen to sidestep emotion. It is neither unwelcoming, nor reacts to my presence with pleasure. This is typical Blauman: neither fragile nor fierce – but the right side of blank. To say enigmatic would suggest a personality that draws people in. But if Blauman does this, she does it only rarely. Her magnetism is sporadic, subtle: even selective. It takes a dedicated fan to stay patient with her.

    The two thin hands beckon me forward. They work in brief partnership with a short vocal instruction. The voice is low; put on, it seems, either to entertain, or to bewilder (or both). ‘Enter’ it says. Which is what I have been doing for some time now, surely? Maybe I have yet to embody the concept of entering; to have fully entered the spirit of entering. I move too slowly perhaps, compared to Blauman at least, who scuttles ahead of me with unusual speed for a woman of her age and health.  One begins to wonder whether the ‘brisk beetle’ of L J Fleisch’s 1987 poem AbdoMan was indeed, as some have thought, a reference to her (they were after all neighbours at the time). I remind myself to ask Georgy Riecke about this next time we meet.

    The murky ambience and tight dimensions of the entrance hall do not prepare you for the lighter, larger studio. Here is a comparison that writes itself. Rewriting disrupts the potent simplicity of the image. Your imagination is required - but in small measures only. The two thin hands, meanwhile, are back, now offering me a miniature mug, full of something that smells like tea. ‘Sasibe’ says the accompanying voice, or at least that’s what it sounds like. ‘It’s green tea’ she explains. ‘Looks more grey to me'. She peers into her cup to reassess. ‘Titanium white, three measures. Paynes Grey, half a measure. A smidgen of crimson and a touch, the merest touch, of phthalo blue. Yes? No?’ I nod, slowly. ‘That sounds about right to me’ I say. ‘I doubt it’ she retorts. She sounds faintly annoyed; she looks well contented. I look beyond her.

    There is nothing at all unusual about the room. It is as you’d expect from a room that has operated as an artist’s studio for near on sixty years. I have seen it all before – on a smaller scale, perhaps, but nevertheless…. Here is messiness at its most lovable. Never mind the fire nor health risks. Rats need a little culture. And isn’t there something, I don’t know, romantic about mountains of scrunched-up turpentine-stained newspapers, splattered with the oily outpouring of a perennially pained creative mind? No? Still a fire risk? Have it your way. Sad though the flames would be, one suspects that Blauman wouldn’t mind seeing her work go up in flames. She is like that. She wouldn’t will it, but if it happened, she would take it in her stride. It has sometimes seemed as though she has no faith in her trade. ‘Art is essentially futile,’ she once said. ‘That’s what my art is about.’ Admittedly, she’d lose her life work. Not a significant portion of it either: all of it. And yet, when I ask how she’d react to such a tragedy, she smiles, almost as if this was a fantasy of hers.  ‘If it was a mistake, of course, I wouldn’t be able to regret it’. The smile is followed by a small, blink-and-you-miss-it frown and, hot on the heels of that, an expression that simply cannot be described in words. ‘God bless acts of God’, she adds, her eyes twinkling madly, as if this is an allusion to something in her life, which it may well be, though God knows what that could be.

    And then I see it. There it is, in the midst of all this mess. Her single masterpiece, her solitary work, her only painting, sitting nonchalantly on the easel. She remarks that I am the first person ever to have seen it ‘in interim’. Then she withdraws the statement. Then she repeats it. I decide to be thrilled in either case. It saves time.

    ‘In interim’: This certaintly explains the look of the painting. The upper half is taken up by a nude: this I recognise. Near the (and a) bottom is a basket of mangoes, which may seem to be  there to protect her  - i.e. the nude's - modesty. Actually, it isn’t, although it covers her well. She will be even better covered soon. By paint. Or by more mangoes. For what we have here is, roughly speaking, a still life being painted over a nude. Such terms, however, would not please Blauman. She would not like ‘still life’. I can’t say that I would ever cuddle up to this term myself. The word ‘still’ seems unfair; stripped of all vitality. It underestimates the power of stationary objects.

    I ask her about the mangoes. They are, she assures me, ‘deeply political - deeply deeply political’ She thinks about this for a couple of seconds, before adding ‘ephemerally speaking, that is’. ‘Distinctly’, I reply. ‘Undoubtedly’ comes the return volley, before I hit the net with a mumbled ‘indeed’. It’s one of many thrillingly obscure conversations we share, in which neither of us are quite sure of what direction we are going in (although you sometimes get the sense that this is the very direction she is heading for).

    I ask her about the nude instead. ‘The what?’ she asks. Then I remember. The nude is last year’s painting. This is what we call a no-go area, a mine-field: the paddock of inestimable awkwardness. As far as Laetitia Blauman is concerned, only one painting matters at any one time. This year’s painting. He who mentions the past does so at his peril.

    Still, I’ve never been known as a tactful art historian….

    ‘Oh, the past!’ she squeals, as if reminded of a difficult ex-lover. ‘The past! Ha! What rot! Who cares about the past?’

    ‘Quite a lot of people’ I venture.

    ‘Between you and me’ she says in a voice which could be heard two blocks away: ‘And don’t tell anyone I said this. But most people are fools. Almost everyone in fact. No? No?’

    I respond accordingly. And put all talk of the past in the past.

    Those who have followed my progress on The Story of Forgotten Art so far will have noticed that I have tried my best to cover a large range of cases. We have had artists whose work has been misunderstood, on account of chance (Luis Recagis), of prudishness (Eugene Matendré) and of a so-called ‘curse’ (Khum Tash). We have seen strange mediums: the lavatory door-signs of West Melbourne and the Bruise-works of Maria Von Uppelhart. We have looked at artists who have not, in one sense, been forgotten: whose work has graced the walls of galleries, but who have either been praised for the wrong facet of their output (Henry Adolphus Hunt) or, in the case of Anthony Tosh, forever seen through uneducated eyes.

    With Blauman, we arrive at a related, yet slightly different side of forgotten art. Art that is very often seen – and yet almost eternally hidden. I refer of course to the great underworld of art history; that which lurks beneath the surface of our famous – and not so famous – paintings.

   As the age of x-ray has revealed, there is often more beneath the skin of our paintings than a skeleton. Sometimes there is another body altogether. Paintings that get a lot of attention are often covering others - now forgotten. And these hidden worlds are neither rare nor, as many would think, have they been opened up to the public as freely as you would suppose. Believe it or not (and trust me, it isn’t hard to believe) some of the bigwigs operating our national centres of art are somewhat reluctant to tell the truth about their wards. ‘Underdrawing’ they mumble, when asked what lies below the surface of many paintings: ‘Just underdrawing’. But there is rarely any ‘just’ to these paintings. By no means. And yet there is sadly little talk these days of the aardvark below the Mona Lisa – badly painted though it is. Nor does anyone seem to have the confidence to describe the rather odd abstract painting below Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. And so they ignore it.

    There is a time and place to rage about all of these things. Shall we say next Thursday, my place? In the meantime, let us turn our heads to the ultimate, the definitive, the classic example of over-painting. This is, of course, Laetitia Blauman’s painting – or should I say set of paintings, all of which have been painted, over the course of sixty years, on one canvas. If there is a record, Blauman must have it. Sixty paintings (that’s one a year, for the non-mathematicians among you) on one canvas. Think about it. Sixty paintings on one canvas; the first one painted when the artist was only twenty-two; the current one a work-in-progress by an artist in her early eighties. For sixty years, she has restricted herself to painting on the same shape, in the same room, in the same house.

    I ask her whether she can remember the first painting. Another wonderfully bad move.

    ‘There is only one painting here’.

    ‘The political mangoes?’

    ‘The political mangoes, yes.’

    I am neither foolish nor facetious enough to ask her whether she has any reproductions of her previous paintings, for I know that she hasn’t. She claims to keep no record whatsoever of her past works. ‘If I wanted to see them, I wouldn’t be painting over them,’ she explains, not insensibly. Nevertheless, I’m sure she knows that other people – myself included – do have such reproductions. Not, sadly, of the first few works (there was not enough interest in her work at this stage) but from number ten onwards, photographs do exist – and have, indeed, been collected in book form (albeit a form thoroughly unlicensed by the artist herself). Though this book in some way defeats the purpose of her practice, it is nonetheless an essential tool in understanding the progression of her work as an artist.

    Needless to say, ‘progression’ isn’t a word of which she is overly fond. Or if it is, she masks it well. As for the whole business of interpreting her career, she is unsurprisingly sceptical.

    ‘Don’t you wish for your work to be understood?’ I ask.

  ‘Understood?’ she cries, less beetle now than bird. ‘None of my paintings has ever been understood. No, no, no. There isn’t any time for that. On, on, on, that’s the game. Give me more images, more! The next picture, the next picture, the next picture. No time for thinking. Stuff the past. Stuff it with sage and onion - and stuff it good.’

    One wonders as she speaks these words whether this is really her opinion, or an oblique criticism on the habits of the modern consumer. Again, it’s hard to tell. It’s almost as if Blauman has deliberately fashioned herself in the image of her enemies. It takes a minute or so for me to realise that my question could be better phrased, to enable a less teasing answer.

    ‘But is there anything to be understood?’

    ‘Oh, yes’ she replies. ‘Yes, yes, yes! There’s always something there. Often something profound. But who has time for profundity? Stuff it – and move on.’

    ‘Move onto what?’

    ‘Onto another nothing. A sweet succession of nothings, bringing with them the eternal hope of a quick fix. Which will never come, of course. Nothing ever comes - but nothing.'

    ‘Do you enjoy moving on?' I wonder aloud. 'Do you enjoy being too impatient to wait for the profundity of the image to sink in?’

    She laughs. ‘That would take decades. Centuries. An age. I’d die before understanding arrived. Which is why I move on.’

    ‘But do you enjoy moving on?’

    ‘That’s beside the point. It’s what I do. Enjoyment doesn’t come into it.’

    Blauman resists questioning to the bitter end. Is she pro disposable culture, or anti it? Is she infected by it? Does she know what she is doing at all? Perhaps her greatest asset is not that she has the answers, but that she continues to provoke questions; to create tensions which others may one day resolve.

    Below the mangoes is a nude. Below that, I know, is a cityscape, dominated by a golden tower. A haunting image, the power of which I recall by memory mostly, as all images of it are blurred (Blauman having recently made great attempts to avoid people photographing her work). To think that this painting is hidden causes me much sadness. And yet I suppose there is also a sense of mystery about it: an aura of romance. It has not, after all, been destroyed. I have in fact stood in front of it recently. It was and is always there. All that stopped me seeing it again was a layer or two of paint. The same goes for fifty or so other fantastic paintings. If a painting ever had a soul, Blauman’s does.

    Some people call her a conceptual artist; others an Old Masters still others a poor deluded woman. ‘Poor’, however, is one thing that she can never have been. Call me a cynic (go on, do it) but I have never been able to think of Blauman without thinking of money. In one sense, her pursuit of the one perfect painting is not far removed from the dream of many artists. However, though she has saved some money by having only bought one canvas over the course of a career, Blauman’s project has never been driven by monetary concerns. How could it be? She has never sold a painting. She has never sanctioned reproductions. She has only recently received small sums of money from those keen to exhibit the latest layer of her masterpiece. Otherwise her artistic income has been smaller than small.

    How can she afford to work like this? She confides in me. ‘I am related to Romanian royalty’ she says. ‘You’re lying?’ I venture. She looks serious. ‘I am, yes. I am. See how I am!’ No further questions. Oh, self-consciously mysterious artists! When will you ever learn? (Not until we stop falling for you I guess).

    I ask her about her parents. ‘My mother was a woman’ she says, fixing her gaze upon me. I nod enthusiastically. ‘A rich woman?’ ‘Oh, probably,’ comes the reply. I see that I will have to settle for this, for now. Blauman’s defences are deep – and almost impossible to penetrate. She has as many layers as her painting; some of quite unknown, un-chartered: there - and yet not there.

    After another cup of Sasibe, I start to wonder how long Laetitia Blauman will live. I have been examining those two thin hands, and I wonder that she has survived this long. Understandably I can’t help but ponder over the fate of her painting. A part of me thinks it should die with her. Another part of me demands that it should be heavily scrutinised under x-ray for several months; that, wherever possible, layers of paint might be peeled off, transferred, re-laid; that all sixty paintings or more might, one day, inhabit a canvas of their own. Impossible, I know – but what a dream! It would seem sad not to try and follow it. And it would be no more than she deserved.

    When I think about it, however, both eventualities seem equally just. An instant ending: a noble death alongside its nobly inscrutable creator. Or the drawn-out investigation; the slow re-creation of a singular imagination; the gradual ascent to immortality. Either would suffice, depending on how you look at it. But what does Blauman think?

    I present to her the options. She thinks long and hard about it. Finally:

    ‘You know what? You may be right. This tea is a tad grey, isn’t it?’ And she adds another stroke of orange to the mangoes, covering a finger of the nude as adeptly as she covers her own footsteps and thoughts. I leave the room shortly afterwards. I doubt she notices my absence.