The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [160]
There was more naked female flesh in Les Fantoches where they met. It showed what looked like an artist’s garret with a long couch in the mansard corner. The light from the six glass squares of the window illuminated the naked body of a woman who lay diagonally across most of the canvas. Her head lay at an awkward angle. Her arms were open, and bent, with pathetically clenched fists. Her hair was dark, her eyes were closed, her expression might have been a pout or a scowl. Her legs were splayed, her tiny slit visible, though there was no pubic hair. One foot rested awkwardly on an embroidered cushion on the floor, one was equally awkwardly clinging to the embroidered cover of the couch. She looked both very uncomfortable and completely inert, her flesh like putty. Behind her sat a bearded, handsome man, his face intent on a delicate doll, or puppet, whose waist was circled by his two hands—the two seemed to be conversing. The rest of the painting was peopled with dolls, or puppets, shining out of the gloom—a Javanese figure, a Byzantine queen, erect and tiny and full of presence, a floating Rapunzel in the foreground, all long hair and huge wistful eyes. A jointed doll with no sex lay face down at an angle to the naked woman’s knees. A kind of Punchinello was draped over the man’s knee. The Punchinello had the peculiar lifelessness of unanimated cloth, which is different from inert female flesh.
When August Steyning arrived, they saw why he had picked this painting. He was accompanied by the puppetmaster from Munich, who had performed at the Midsummer party. Anselm Stern was soberly dressed in a black frock-coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. With him, thin and wiry, wearing a beret and a pale blue cravat, was a young man who was obviously his son, and was introduced as Wolfgang. They were neither of them tall: both had large dark eyes and sharp noses and mouths. Humphry asked Steyning and Stern to explain the painting, please.
“We can’t agree on anything. Is she alive, is she dead? Is he ignoring the flesh for art and if so is he culpable or to be admired? Could he animate the dead woman if he gave her the attention he’s giving the pretty doll? She looks damnably uncomfortable, as though she’ll skid off that couch any minute.”
Steyning laughed.
“It’s about the borders between the real and the imagined. And the imagined has more life than the real—much more—but it is the artist who gives the figures life.”
Olive said it was a pity more women didn’t paint allegories about the imagination. This woman was like clay in a stocking.
Everyone looked at Anselm Stern.
“What one gives to one’s art,” he said, in slightly uncertain English, “is taken away out of the life, this is so. One gives the energy to the figures. It is one’s own energy, but also kinetic. Who is more real to me, the figures in the box in my head or the figures on the streets?”
“You could see this artist as a vampire,” said Steyning provocatively. “He has sucked the life out of that poor girl and is giving it to wooden limbs and painted faces.”
“He has a good face,” said Stern, smiling slightly.
Philip pulled at Fludd’s sleeve and pointed out in a whisper that the draped Punchinello was the reverse image of the draped human woman.
“The message is,” said Stern, “that art is