The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [30]
I find that as the months pass I have a strangely increased sensitivity to the quality of paper.
And I find that I have fallen for Charles. He is a passionate scholar. He is well dressed and good at art history and dogged in research. What a great and unlikely trinity of attributes to have, I think, aspirationally.
Charles had a very particular reason to do his research work. He believed that ‘all of Dürer’s drawings, even the lightest of sketches, merited a special mention, that nothing that was attributed to the hand of our master should be omitted . . .’ Charles knows that it is intimacy that matters. Picking up a drawing enables us to ‘catch the thought of the artist in all its freshness, at the very moment of manifestation, with perhaps even more truth and sincerity than in the works that require arduous hours of labour, with the defiant patience of the genius’.
This is a wonderful manifesto for drawing. It celebrates the moment of apprehension and the fugitive moment of response – a few traces of ink or a few strokes of the pencil. It is also a beautifully coded claim for a conversation between a particular kind of the old and the very new in art. Charles intended this book to ‘make better known in France the greatest German artist’, the first artist he fell in love with during his childhood in Vienna. But it also gave Charles an emotional as well as an intellectual platform from which to argue that different ages informed each other, that a sketch by Dürer could talk to a sketch by Degas. He knew that it could work.
Charles was becoming an advocate in print for the living artists he was getting to know. He was a critic both in his own name and under pseudonyms, arguing the merits of particular paintings, fighting for the cause of Degas’s Little Dancer, ‘standing in her working clothes, tired and worn out . . .’ Now, as editor of the Gazette, he started to commission reviews of the exhibitions of painters he admired. And, passionate and partisan, he had also started buying pictures for the room with the yellow armchair.
Charles’s first pictures were by Berthe Morisot. He loved her work: ‘She grinds flower petals onto her palette, in order to spread them later on her canvas with airy, witty touches, thrown down a little haphazardly. These harmonise, blend, and finish by producing something vital, fine and charming that you do not so much see as intuit . . . one step further and it will be impossible to distinguish or understand anything at all!’
In three years he put together a collection of forty Impressionist works – and bought twenty more for his Bernstein cousins in Berlin. He bought paintings and pastels by Morisot, Cassatt, Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro and Renoir: Charles created one of the great early collections of the Impressionists. All the walls of his rooms must have been filled with these pictures, they must have been hung above each other three deep. Forget the Degas pastel glowing solitary on a gallery wall at the Metropolitan, five feet from another picture on either side, nothing above or below. In this room this pastel (Two Women at the Haberdashers, 1880) must have shaded the Donatello, knocked against a score of other glowing pictures, rubbed up against the vitrine of netsuke.
Charles was in the vanguard. He needed audacity. The Impressionists had their passionate supporters, but were still assailed in the press and by the Academy as charlatans. His advocacy was significant; he had the gravitas of a prominent critic and editor. He also had straightforward utility as a patron for painters who were struggling: it was ‘in the mansion of an American or of a young Israelite banker’ that you would find these paintings, wrote Philippe Burty. And Charles acted as a mahout to other wealthy friends, persuading Madame Straus, giver of the fiercely aesthetic salon, to purchase one of Monet’s Nympheas.
But he was much more than this. He was a real interlocutor, a visitor to their studios