Intimate Impressions.

‘Could we ever know each other without the arts?'

"Nous connaitrions-nous seulement un peu nous-memes, sans les arts?" - Gabrielle Roy

There are artists who lead public lives – Rubens the diplomat, Picasso the showman – and others who keep themselves to themselves. Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings I came to see at the Musée d'Orsay, led an intensely private life in which we can only begin to participate through his art. His diaries give little away – shopping lists, observations on the weather, the odd aphorism. He lived simply in Paris and the country. His family did not even know until after his death in 1947 that he had been married to his companion Marthe de Meligny for twenty-two-years. His more wide-ranging subject matter was commissioned by patrons and publishers. When he painted for himself, he stuck close to home.

He was born in 1867 on the out outskirts of Paris, the young Bonnard trained as a lawyer but also enrolled in the Academie Julian and the painting section of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After he failed his civil service exam, he became involved with a small group called the Nabis (the Hebrew words for prophets), led by Paul Serusier, and inspired by Gauguin.

The Croquet Game with its carefully composed patchwork of flat patterns is clearly derived from Japanese prints. The title Crepuscule, under which it was first exhibited, suggests an affinity with the symbolic poems of Mallarmé. Its decorative appeal confirmed the ambitions of the group not to be confined to easel painting but to branch out into producing panels for interiors, book illustrations, posters and theatre designs. Sharing studios, exhibition spaces and commissions from small magazine – notably La Revue Blanche – the Nabis thrived in the artistic climate of belle-époque Paris.

Despite waspish comments on his work from some of the older generation of Impressionists, Bonnard never really had to struggle to succeed. By the turn of the last century he was working with the playwright Alfred Jarry and receiving commissions for sets of lithographs from Ambroise Vollard. He visited museums in Spain, and the Low Countries, accompanied by Edouard Vuillard. He made trips to the South of France, staying at first with Maillol, then Manguin. In 1911, perhaps flush from the commissions of the great Moscow industrialist collector Ivan Morozov, he bought an 11 CV Renault. The next year, he declined the offer of the Légion d'Honneur.

What interested Bonnard was not the representation of life itself but the representation of how we perceive life. The depiction of objects in blurred and sharp focus, in thin and thick paint, and the shimmering representation of light, combined to recreate the sense of flux we experience on first scanning a scene. At his best, Bonnard could achieve an overall visual rhythm and unity, while at the same time leaving parts of the canvas mysteriously unresolved.

Significantly, he himself did not always know when paintings were finished, working on some for years and touching up others even after they were hanging in houses and galleries.

His art did not depend on direct observations but on contemplation. ‘I have all my subjects to hand,’ he said. ‘I go and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting, I reflect, I dream.’ There is an elegiac feeling to many of his works, a Proustian savouring of sensations recalled. He lived with Marthe for nearly fifty years and her likeness appears in over 300 paintings., but there is no precise physical description and little sense of the her growing old. Sometimes she is peripheral to the main subject; sometimes her face is turned away. She is always self-absorbed, not engaged with the artist or viewer. Perhaps this was a reflection of the reclusive personality, exacerbated by chronic ill health – her prone immersion in the bath, which inspired some of Bonnard’s most haunting images, may have been a form of hydrotherapy.

But it also suited the artist to be separate, freed of the responsibilities of relationships to explore the ever-challenging gap between life and art.

Mais, c'est pas vrai! (as Holly Golightly might say)

It is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year. I say this with some confidence because, just before reading it, I spent an evening flipping through book catalogues. I started eager, but after a while, I set the pencil down. Finally, I lowered my face to my hands and wept. Okay, I didn’t cry. But I could have, for after wading through all the catalogues, I had marked only two books.

I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing and reading how the fault lies in some toxic combination of blogger and social networking. Sorry. It’s the books. Too many books, too many boring books, too many unedited books, too many overlong books that announce, more bluntly than anything else, publishing’s nearly universal refusal to recognize how the Internet has changed reading habits.(Note to publishers: the neighborhood library thanks you for every book you publish that’s more than 300 pages).

But “Fifth Ave, 5 AM” is the kind of book that could keep me home, and that’s odd, because its nominal topic -how the film of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came to be made, and why Audrey Hepburn was so crucial to that effort -concerns a film I’ve never watched all the way through.

The cool thing: you don’t have to care about any of that to love the book.

You just have to like back lot gossip (and who doesn’t). Paramount’s head of production hated the theme song -“Moon River.” Babe Paley smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, using an ivory holder. Marilyn Monroe lamented that she never had a home, “not with my own furniture.” Colette “discovered” Hepburn. Akira Kurosawa hated Mickey Rooney.

You have to be interested in how things really work. In this case, how, at a time of prudery and censorship, two smart producers, one savvy director and a sharp screenwriter figured out how to take “a novel with no second act, a nameless gay protagonist, a motiveless drama and an unhappy ending and turn it into a Hollywood movie.”

You have to be interested in a book that has an idea at the center of the narrative - how Audrey Hepburn, a “good girl princess” as pure as Doris Day, helped to change the American distaste for “bad girls” with a single movie. And, just as much, with “a little black dress” that even a mouse of a secretary could afford.

And, finally, you have to respond to a writer who can tell a complicated story in 200 crisp pages -and who can, at will, fire off zingers like “Truman needed her [Babe Paley] too. She looked good on him.” Or this, also about Capote: “If you could measure a man’s ego by the length of his ego, then this one had no end.”

This is a book that’s very inside Hollywood. George Axelrod? Major screenwriter and playwright, almost certainly unknown to you. Mary Jurow and Richard Shepherd –a lunch if you can name, without Google, another movie they produced. Not important stuff, but fun.

What’s especially satisfying: where the story begins. Which is to say: much earlier than you think. In 1951, when Audrey Hepburn was not yet magic. With George Axelrod’s 1950s efforts to get sex -as an adult topic, and rated as such -into Hollywood movies. With Truman Capote becoming Himself. In short, as in real life, the back story is key.

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman”, by Sam Wasson, “it’s a good thing”.

A Collector’s Tale

Bruce Chatwin’s exotic voyages have given us delightful travel as in Patagonia and Songlines. In his wanderings, the writer collected myths, legends, and disparate cultural blocks, which he built into the masonry of his own, unique narrations. In his novel Utz, alchemy, cabala, and metaphysical pursuits are the components of a strange tale, at whose center lies a priceless collection of exquisite porcelains.

Researching the nature of compulsive collecting, the nameless narrator of Utz travels in 1967 to Prague-“the most mysterious of European cities”-where he meets the equally mysterious Utz, a part-Jewish German expatriate whose way of life is peculiarly wedded to the Meissen porcelains he has lovingly collected.

What is the strange power of these delightful pieces-Harlequin, Pulcinella, Scaramouche, and scores of others? (He knows he could never succeed in smuggling them to the West.) Utz himself has a metaphysical explanation for the potency of porcelain: it is a kind of philosopher’s stone, ”a magical and talismanic substance…the antidote to decay.”

And who is the enigmatic Utz, whose maid is also his wife? Utz is physically nondescript, yet he has many mistresses. Allowed to make annual trips to the spa at Vichy, he could defect, but he is repelled by the banality of the abundance that he sees there. Utz chooses to remain in Prague, to grovel and “live within the lie.”

The final mystery is the most unsettling: before his death, Utz destroys his precious porcelains. Is he smashing his idols?, the narrator wonders. Is he spiting the state, which would have inherited the collection? Is he disgusted with the compromise he made to remain in Prague?

Chatwin meditates in his travel books on man as wanderer. In his fiction, by contrast, he writes about people who stay put. Abel and Cain are for him the archetypes of two classes of people; in In Patagonia he writes of “Abel, the wanderer” and “Cain, the hoarder of property.” Utz is clearly one of the latter. As wryly humorous as Utz’s Harlequin, as enigmatic as Prague, this compact novel is itself a finely wrought miniature, fired in Chatwin’s original and alluring imagination.