Leonora (7 page)

‘Painting.'

After every battle with her father, Leonora seethes with rage. This time she writes: ‘The only person who was there at my birth was our beloved, loyal and old fox terrier
Boozy
, along with a machine for sterilising cows.' She does not come downstairs to eat until her father knocks at the door of her bedroom:

‘What are you doing?'

‘I am adding the next chapters to my manual of disobedience.'

7

MAX ERNST

H
IS DAUGHTER'S RESPONSE AMUSES
Harold Carrington. She challenges everything and everyone, including him. A man more accustomed to uncertain vacillation by way of reaction, he is always surprised that his daughter seems completely undaunted by him.

‘If you go off to London, I won't give you a penny piece.'

Leonora is admitted to the Chelsea School of Art. She walks along the Thames, a river which is simultaneously spirited and noble. She too is a river: she has the force of one. She explores South Kensington all over again, and smiles at the memory of her former forays around it in a limousine. After attending Court and visiting the royal box, she has gone to live in a basement where she has scarcely enough on which to feed herself. Under orders from Harold Carrington, an employee of Imperial Chemical teaches her how to drive the Fiat her father has bought her. They make excursions to the countryside of an evening, and its gentle slopes are so smooth that Leonora thinks it good to be British.

It is always well worth living in South Kensington, despite having to subsist on a diet of eggs fried on the little gas hob. Serge Chermayeff – also looking out for her on her father's orders – takes her to visit the academy of the French artist Amédée Ozenfant who, together with Le Corbusier, founded the movement known as Purism. With a great curiosity and self-assurance, the maestro studies her from top to toe. ‘From now on, you'll be learning how to work,' he pronounces in dry tones and a French accent, before seating her on a bench in a circle of students, each one facing their own easel.

‘No charcoal allowed! And no red chalk! Pencil, nothing except lead pencil!'

Leonora obeys him as she has never obeyed anyone before. He teaches her to draw an apple with a single line. If it doesn't come out right, she has to repeat the exercise over and over again sitting in front of one blank sheet of paper after another, and in front of the same apple gradually rotting away before her eyes. Ozenfant never humiliates her, or makes fun of her ambitions. Serge Chermayeff lets Carrington know that his daughter has not missed a single class, and definitely has talent. The maestro has succeeded in taming her – and with excellent results. He has no idea that out of his sight and in her own room, the heiress of Imperial Chemical draws very different subjects to the rotting apple he obliges her to reproduce again and again. He is equally unaware that Leonora is romantically involved with an Egyptian who has a singularly prominent nose. ‘Such a pity I never went to Cairo when I travelled with my mother, we would have had so much in common!'

In her basement, she paints what surges forth from her imagination. She only shows the results to Ursula Goldfinger, the friend who meets her at the end of class each day.

‘So your husband is Hungarian?' Leonora enquires.

‘Yes, and a great architect. You should meet him.'

Another friend, Stella Snead, amplifies by way of explanation: ‘You did know, didn't you, that Ursula is the heiress to Crosse & Blackwell, the soup and condiments manufacturer, and she can afford to buy whatever she wants?'

What an effect money can have! Ursula, tall and strong, treats Leonora with affection because she is so unconventional and direct in her criticisms. During lessons she listens to their classmates with a gentle irony, and reports to Ursula: ‘Blessed is he who expects nothing for he will not be disappointed.' Stella is inconstant, while in contrast Leonora never misses a class, and never once baulks at the discipline imposed. Ozenfant demands they all know the essentials of painting: what a pencil or a tube of paint or oils are made of. He obliges them to buy pencils as hard as steel and to paint free-hand, repeating the action until their nerves are frayed. Only once does Leonora dare to speak out:

‘The apple has gone rotten.'

‘Then do it from memory the way it was before,' he commands.

At the top of a page, Leonora sketches the face of a woman, her line never trembles and is pure in its clarity. Leonora had never seen another woman naked, peeled of her everyday shell, but she achieves the outline at her first attempt. Leonora has none of the training in anatomy that the rest of the class has, but her drawing lives, in sharp contrast to Ursula's, and even more to Stella Snead's. Ozenfant congratulates her.

One afternoon, the maestro informs them that the model hasn't arrived and that one of his female disciples should offer to pose. The one who does is so thin that she looks like a mass of hollows, and you have to seek out her eyes at the bottom of an abyss.

The next time the same situation arises, Leonora volunteers.

‘Don't do it,' Ursula advises her. ‘Do you know what he asked the last one who offered? He asked her “What do you think you are, a spider?”'

The maestro can be cruel.

‘Your work is worthless, and you're not taking it seriously. If there's no rapid improvement, you cannot possibly continue on the course. I'll give you a week.'

Leonora comes across a young man copying a Whistler in the Tate Gallery. He paints as if his life depended on it, and his fervour illuminates the gallery. Leonora enjoys her encounters with him and a day when they don't meet comes to seem like a day with something missing.

Ursula tells her that in other workshops, students are obliged to draw
The Oracle of Delphi
,
Apollo
or
The Venus de Milo
, subjects that bore her to such a degree that the pencil falls from her fingers.

On emerging from class with Stella or with Ursula, Leonora uses her savings to buy books on alchemy from second-hand bookstalls.

‘Alchemy,' the aged bookseller informs her, ‘is a means to achieve total knowledge and leads to liberation.'

‘That is exactly what I am seeking: liberation. But I also want to transform my father.'

‘Your father will annihilate you.'

Leonora purchases a little amber-coloured bottle with the power to transform individuals, causing them to be reborn, while at the same time mitigating panic attacks.

‘That's exactly what I most want. For Harold to be reborn.'

Leonora transforms her liberty into a life force.

‘Mama, the freer I feel, the better I paint. I am continually making progress, thanks to this immense force I know I have within me.'

Maurie listens to her daughter with interest, for she too believes that some of the doors of perception still remain closed, and that philtres and charms hold the keys to unlock them. She gives Leonora a copy of Herbert Read's
Surrealism
. On the cover there is a reproduction of a painting by Max Ernst,
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
. On seeing it, Leonora feels a flame ignite deep within her. Her emotions are so visceral that she tells her mother:

‘You'll never know the gift you have given me. One day I shall be able to see the world just as Ernst has painted it.'

Why is she so different to everyone else? What occurred at her birth to make her turn out like this? How come she always fabricates one problem after another? All the same, there is something admirable lodged deep within her, something of which Maurie has intimations without being able to define precisely what is there.

Leonora confides her passion for
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
to Ursula, how it has a life of its own, its actuality underlined by a little door and a window grille, made of wood, that protrude from the painting of a nightingale from which the two terrified children are striving to escape. How can a tiny bird be a threat? She too feels persecuted by what is incomprehensible, by what only the
sidhes
understand, and what now this artist has also discovered. Was Carrington the nightingale who persecuted her and Gerard? Is a bird capable of attacking her and bloodying her canvas? Can evil reside in this minute red thing fluttering against a painted sky?

‘This artist interests me enormously, Ursula.'

‘Excellent. My husband is a friend of his! We'll hold a dinner party, invite some notable people along, and I promise you can come and get to know him.'

All at once, Ursula decides to show her Ernst's collages: newspaper cut-outs glued together with illustrations from yellowing magazines, things that no-one had previously dreamt of being of significance, in which everything comes endowed with value. Young virgins or old women about to be tortured, their breasts exposed to view, smiling at their executioners, men with the faces of rabbits or dogs or cockerels, or most frequently of a lion, embracing widows and animals in smart suits, creatures who would never be seen together in daily life. The same follows for plants and insects: a woman as a gardenia, a man as an elephant. Everything moves with a hallucinogenic quality. Ferocious and sarcastic, Max Ernst scandalises his viewers. Dürer, Blake and Goya must be turning in their graves to see themselves depicted suckling the Lion of Belfort, his snout buried in the breasts of a hetera, an upmarket prostitute. Max has converted men into murderers, nocturnal bandits, carrion crows, and into priests: unclean animals who violate women. A new and hitherto invisible reality emerges from the surface of his painting, to be explored by his eagle eye.

Why does this German artist have no respect for them? What harm did they do him, for him to shoot them down in flames in the weekly editions of
Une semaine de bonté
?
La femme 100 têtes
consists in little scraps of papery nonsense which he cuts and arranges to form a profoundly perverse and malevolent whole; nudity would be less lascivious than tight-fitting corsets from which a breast is about to escape. Unveiled women proffer their backsides to a decorated military general, an archbishop, a dandy, to the Sphinx. Max Ernst, king of all the birds, still carries within him a Sleeping Beauty, a Red Queen.

‘So everything can be art, can it?'

‘No, not everything,' replies Ursula. ‘Max's art is a real find. As you can see, the least offensive of his prints is this one of a woman riding the waves on her bed. It is a poem made visual. Would you like to sleep on the sea?'

‘It looks like the work of a diabolical child … The idea of anyone but Nanny watching me sleep terrifies me …'

‘The work of art of his that has caused the most scandal is that of the Virgin breast-feeding the Infant Jesus in the presence of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Eluard and Max himself. Any ordinary person seeing it for the first time will feel hit between the eyes, and it goes beyond that and confronts the Surrealists themselves.'

‘André Breton looks like a wild animal …'

‘Yes, he is the lion in all his collages.'

‘What does Ernst want to tell us?'

‘His creations are an anti-art, he is rounding on his masters …'

Max Ernst appropriates from the works of the past and profanes them; inside his mind they become outrageous, he over-paints classical images and in so doing violates them; he exploits them to fire his own inventiveness. Despite her fears, Leonora is enthused; there's something about Max's collages that takes her out of herself, and his cruelty terrifies her. He never requests permission, but appropriates, smudges and cuts, mutilates and muddies. Everything is his to do as he wants with. According to Ursula, he once declared: ‘The Venus de Milo has to be torn down from her pedestal.' He then puts the pieces back together again as if reassembling a chicken before serving up its dismembered parts for dinner.

‘The truth is that I have never dared to search my unconscious for what he has found in his. I hide many images away deep inside me so they won't discover me. The most I have managed to give Ozenfant is the head of a grackle bird but what Ernst gets up to astounds me. Next to him the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse is a turtle dove. Oh Ursula! I feel surrounded by madness, and I don't know how to shut the door on it.'

‘You can never close the door, don't act as if you don't know as much. It all goes back to the First World War and the imbecility of the powerful. Dadadadadadada.'

‘What's up with you, Ursula?'

‘I'm imitating the repeat shot of artillery fire or the speeches of the heads of state. In 1920, Jean Arp – a friend of Max's – joined the conspiracy of those revolted by the war and mounted the first International Dadaist Exhibition in a Cologne urinal. The Dadaists were right: Europe was on the verge of a catastrophe. By nature I am both a subversive and a rebel and you are too. If you don't act according to your instincts, you'll be lost.'

‘But I still don't know what I am, all I know is that I love painting more than anything else in the world.'

‘We have Freud on hand to guide us as we slough off our skin like snakes.' Ursula places a hand on her shoulder. ‘Look, what does this remind you of? I took it from the
Lettres du voyant.
Rimbaud tells us that a poet discovers the occult thanks to a wide, deep and reasoned disordering of our feelings. According to him, a poet needs to seek out every form of love, suffering and madness, to drink to the dregs every kind of poison, in order to conserve their quintessence. Reaching such a point is an indescribable torture, requiring more than superhuman strength. In the face of all the others, you become the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed and the Supreme Sage, before arriving at the great unknown! This can only be achieved by those possessed of a rich soul, one they are willing to cultivate without the fear of going mad.'