November 14th 2024
Dear all,
In the wake of the US elections, after so much battering at our psyches from news items, opinion polls, shattering results and post-mortems, I feel that art, music and literature have my hungry attention, during these last few days in Paris before we return to the US.
I’ve listened over and over to Lang Lang playing Chopin. I’ve been with my step-daughter Stephanie to the Orangerie, to sit in front of Monet’s vast paintings of water-lilies, in the space designated for meditation and silence. It was like a draught of clean water. I thought how Monet gave them to the state after the first World War, in which he refused to fight. He was right – his art meant more than a sacrifice of his life. He chose to paint, not fight, when all the pressure was on him to join his generation in that massacre.
It's an individual choice, of course. Politics or art? Struggle or serenity? Sometimes we have to take on both at once.
The collection put together by the German art-dealer Heinz Berggruen was next, in the same museum. He had a great range of paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Paul Klee and sculpture by Giacometti, and here are a few of them that I photographed. Again, I thought of Picasso and the Spanish civil war, his painting of Guernica, his escape from Spain to paint unhindered. Do we escape or stay put and fight? Paint, write, make music, keep ourselves alive that way, or do we throw ourselves into whatever fray we confront? Again, it’s an open question. Do we deconstruct reality or represent it? What is the artist’s role in our time, when so much has become mere decoration, or entertainment? Do we need to entertain ourselves more – and entertain others? Do we go silent, or speak out? These are all open questions, urgent for our time, in which humanity faces so many predicaments. For myself, I found great solace in the juxtaposition of the pears and apples that Picasso painted, and in the steady serene gaze of Madame Cezanne.
A personal pleasure this week was to hear that a collection of short stories I wrote in the 1970’s, illustrated by my then-husband, Michael Brackenbury, is about to be re-published by Michael Walmer in the UK, with an introduction by A.L.Kennedy. It’s called “No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” Prophetic, or merely banal? Sometimes a piece of the past resurfaces and (I hope) makes sense in the present; sometimes our younger selves remind us, surprisingly, what matters. The drawings seem to me to fizz still with an energy that was entirely 1970’s.
Our world has changed again in the last week, and we are all confronting the implications of that change. Please take care of yourselves, and look at something that makes you smile!
Affectionately, Ros