Two anecdotes

 Two anecdotes

“Every prominent landholding family in the Rajput caste, I discovered, inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians, and praise singers, who celebrated the family's lineage and deeds. It was considered a disgrace if these minstrels were forced by neglect to formally "divorce" their patrons. Then they would break the strings of their instruments and bury them in front of their patron's house, cutting the family off from the accumulated centuries of ancestral songs, stories, and traditions. It was the oral equivalent of a library or a family archive being burned to cinders.” This is from William Dalrymple Home in India.

I love those broken strings, that burial! This anecdote is good for thinking - it is of that type, nearing the status of a parable. Isn’t this what happened, on a macro scale, in the 19th century, as art became detached from the old systems of patronage – from the aristocracy, the court and the church? Visual art was and is as inflected by this detachment as by any formal shift in its consciousness – or I should say that the formal shifts, like the cutting of the strings of the instrument, were unconsciously related to the moment of detachment. The melancholy of emancipation, if you will.

Another anecdote, this one from Leonor Fini’s letters. Fini is an amazing person who has rather been forgotten or at least marginalized. She was an artist who was fully equal to the other surrealist painters of her time. And she was a figure in Tout Paris, a fashionista, a wearer of Schiaparelli, a women who liked to refer to her own nervous beauty in her letters to her rather louche writer-lover, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. Her acerbic comments on the fashionable and artsy in the interwar period are fascinating – Richard Overstreet, in his introduction to the letters, writers of her “sovereign way of redefining the relation between the sexes”. These sovereigns, these self-appointed kings and queens, these celebrities, these rebel rebels!

So, in 1935, she writes to Pieyre de M. about De Chirico. She knows him both as a painter and another Italian in Paris. There’s a De Chirico shown at the galerie Percier. Kahnweiler finds a Czech client who wants to buy it. The client says he would be “happy to have a dedication from de Chirico behind the canvas.” So De Chirico shows up a few days later and says: “I never made that painting. It is really a pigstye (cochonnerie)! I have never painted that genre of canvas, etc. etc.”

“Can [Fini’s name for Kahnweiler] explains to De Chirico that the painting has been sold and that is the way it is, it is rather tedious. So De Chirico declares, okay, it is really no bother. He writes an affectionate dedication behind the canvas and says: if you need some older paintings, don’t buy them from the dealers, come to me.” Some days later another client shows up, asking for an older De Chirico of the same period. Can goes to De Chirico, who says: I don’t know one, but I can make one in a few hours. (In fact, he painted it, I saw it, it is a disgrace). I find all this strange and hallucinating. There is certainly a side of De Chirico that is practical, a little naïve and piggish, which wants to cheat and make money. One thing is certain: the original painting wasn’t a counterfeit. It is typical of De Chirico to say it is.”

I love this anecdote. Fini’s letters were published long after Derrida wrote “The Truth in Painting”, but this anecdote, with its intricate knitting of the true and the false – much like Poe’s story of the Purloined letter – has that fine castrated parable glide to it, a solution in search of an enigma.