‘Description is revelation’

Tom Allan has just written a brilliant book about thatching – against the odds, because arcane physical processes, automatic to the adept, have to be captured in words. He is aware of the problem. In On the Roof: A thatcher’s journey, he cites Richard Sennett’s dictum: “it is almost impossible to use words to describe a complex series of actions like tying a slipknot – a problem only too familiar to someone writing a book about thatching.” Think about the intricacy of tying a shoelace and the moment of magic when the second loop manifests itself out of sheer momentum and the thing is bedded, firm and final. The fingers do – have done – something swift the brain can’t quite follow. It is an intricate formula, unfollowable as Olympic high diving to outsiders. No wonder Matt, J. D. Salinger’s actor son, fondly remembered his father teaching him to tie his shoelaces.

Everything should be describable. To the gifted writer it is axiomatic that words are up to the job. Otherwise experience is summary. This is Nabokov capturing exactly something fugitive, rescuing life from oblivion. His French governess is met by a sled:

At the juicy smack of their driver’s lips the horses strain their quarters, shift hooves, strain again; and then Mademoiselle gives a backward jerk of her torso as the heavy sleigh is wrenched out of its world of steel, fur, flesh, to enter a frictionless medium where it skims along a spectral road that it seems barely to touch.

Something never seen, until now.

If you describe a painting accurately it is restored for the reader. It becomes detailed. That is why painters copy the grand masters. Copying involves really looking, complete concentration – avoiding the approximations of experience. In some ways description enhances reproduction. Picasso’s “Dora Maar with Green Fingernails” (1936) was recently shown at the Accademia in Venice, on loan from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin. The green fingernails on the postcard are muted, green only because the painting’s title tells us they are. In the actual painting they are vivid, striking, as are the two four-fingered hands. The title illustrates my point. It is an act of description.

Her eyeshadow is violet. Her lower lip is violet. Her eyelashes are like crushed insects. She is in profile and full-face. Her right eye is in profile. The hair is scraped back and plaited, but a fizzy scrub at the hairline. And the end of the hair is ragged like the finish from a starved brush – a brushstroke for unbrushed hair. Picasso’s nostrils are two-for-one: basically, the nose is in profile but the second phantom full-face nostril is quietly modelled to the right. It is like the famous duck/rabbit invoked by Ernst Gombrich – except that Picasso makes you see both at the same time. He has caught her poise and her panic – everywhere, including the one finger anxious at the corner of her mouth.

Describing is noticing. Lucian Freud drew his mother on her deathbed. Her mouth is exactly like an oboist, the same sunken sulk, the same chin tuck. A macabre comparison impossible to refuse once registered.

Now Degas’s great painting “Victoria Dubourg” (c.1868–9). It is a feat of limitation, a painting of her voluminous brown dress. Everything in the painting is brown – the floorboards, the chair she is sitting on, the unoccupied chair on her left, the brown fireplace to her right. She is leaning slightly forward, her clasped hands resting on her knees. You only have to consider Freud’s paintings of Leigh Bowery’s blank back, empty of interest, to see that the Degas is a tour de force of painting the unpaintable, bringing interest to the profoundly dull. Her face is good, but the drab delta of dress is the real subject: to it, Degas brings a subtle excitement, the weighty hem, the rumour of body shape, her knees, her hips, her legs from her knees to her ankles.

Finally, Degas’s fond, intent drawing of Hortense Valpinçon (1883). Degas drew her twice because, the first time, he ran out of paper and couldn’t fit in her bun. Both drawings are wonderful, but the first is superior. The portraits, each in profile, aren’t identical. The expression of the mouths is different. They could be sisters, were it not for their shared mole to the right of the lips. The mole is irrefutable. It isn’t large. It is subtle, unfinished, not quite symmetrical. In the second portrait it is quite circular. The first try shows Degas’s hand at work, the hair a miracle of bold black chalk marks, certain yet with an air of improvisation. Her nose is fractionally more aquiline, her eye concentrated, her chin bold, her demeanour handsome and intelligent, like a female version of the young T. S. Eliot. Both portraits are made by Degas’s firm, controlling outline, which brings the certainty of fixative to the likeness, containing the exuberant shading. The device works brilliantly, invisible at first, but once seen, reminiscent of Man Ray’s technique of solarization.

A touching footnote: Degas only gave her the drawing in 1907. His servant, Zoé, urged her, “Take it, Madame, it still looks like you”.

Craig Raine is Emeritus Fellow in English at New College, Oxford. His most recent book is My Grandmother’s Glass Eye: A look at poetry, 2016

The post ‘Description is revelation’ appeared first on TLS.