Giovanni Muro (V3) 10th April 1986, John Singer Sargent - an Interior Scene

“ ...the Barbaro-saloon thing ...I absolutely and unreservedly adored ....” Henry James , letter ,dated 16th March 1899 , to Mr and Mrs Daniel Curtis. “If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same stories all over again. Don’t you feel it? Listen: men and women around us all sound the same. Same arguments, same quarrels, same scenes. Same attractions and separations. Same difficulties, the impossibility of reaching each other. Same … same… always the same” Luce Irigarey, When our lips speak together, 1980 “Our sense of presentness usually proceeds ...with our mind tumbling off into wandering. Usually , we return and ride the wave and tumble and resume the ride and tumble...this falling away and return is what we are” Harold Brodsky, quoted by Galen Strawson, This Wild Darkness. “Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension... Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world so that man can endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world”. Morse Peckham, Man’s rage for chaos: biology, behaviour and the arts , 1965 “In this sense, our ego lasts three seconds. Everything else is either hope or an embarrassing incident. Usually both.” Miroslav Holub, The dimension of the present moment, 1990. “OK, now I’ve told you, don’t you say a word; just find a seat and stay there. Understood?” If Giulia sounded abrupt and angry towards Giovanni as they climbed the stairs to the Palazzo’s piano nobile one early afternoon in the Spring of 1986 , it was nothing compared with her sense of frustration at herself. The day had started well , with Giulia crossing over to Giudecca to model for her good friend Anna Rossettini, as she did most months. It was something that Giulia enjoyed doing, as an act of support , of generosity, for her slightly older friend, whose art she believed in, stepping out of her clothes while Anna readied herself, then assuming a pose on the divan that reflected the suggestions that Anna had made while they had talked beforehand, usually over a stove-brewed coffee. In exchange , over the years , Anna had give to Giulia a number of her drawings , one of which Giulia had put up on her bedroom wall. That was sufficient. That was more than enough, particularly as it was one of a pair and the other hung over Anna’s bed. Today the light had fallen at an angle onto Giulia’s raised hip and down across her waist, as if in a moment of secular Annunciation. Giulia found the sun’s warmth on her skin pleasing although she wished she’d taken a bit more care when placing her forearm on the bed to brace her upper body, as a numbness was already spreading from the elbow. It was while her body was presented in this way to Anna, that Giulia’s mind had turned to her appointment that afternoon, when she was to assist with a costume photo-shoot within the ornate splendour of Palazzo Barbaro’s celebrated grand salon. Even though the set-up was relatively straight-forward , assembling everyone on the day had taken endless negotiations, including identifying a suitable dancer to model the costumes and then having to accommodate her time constraints and increasing equivocations. But at last all had apparently fallen into place . Reassuringly, the mirrors , that had been recently produced by Nanda Vigo and that were being lent for the occasion, had arrived at the Palazzo late yesterday , along with a rack of Sonia Biacchi’s latest dance costumes and a booth for the model to change behind. These mirrors had now been mounted onto movable partitions, as the idea was that the photographer would capture within their modern frames glimpsed reflections of both the room’s rococo splendour and also Biacchi’s ultra contemporary sculptural designs. So, in theory, everything was in place. Sonia was one of Giulia’s closest professional acquaintances in Venice , as they shared complementary interests in the aesthetics and cultural significance of fabrics and clothing design . Conveniently, Sonia’s recently established workspace ( known as the C.T.R. and located in the deconsecrated church of Santi Cosma e Damiano on Giudecca), was very close to Anna’s studio, so Giulia would often call in on her way to or from those sessions. The C.T.R , as conceived by Sonia, was helping to open up ballet and dance to the whole community , while Sonia was establishing a reputation for creating startlingly experimental theatre and dance costumes . Sonia’s creations, with their confidence, purpose and energy, made for a profoundly personal and idiosyncratic body of work , while her conception of “clothing” and costume , with her use of experimental materials and sense of sculptural formalism , was so innovative that she had already occasioned a re-invigoration and re imagination of the legacy of Oskar Schlemmer and his Triadic ballet of some sixty years previously, that had up until then been steadily falling into neglect, generally seen to been a quirky episode in the long march of 20th century art. Although in the hours leading up to an “event” always caused Giulia some anxiety she was ordinarily capable of holding her fears in check .But on this occasion what continued to trouble Giulia was that Giovanni, hearing of the location a week or so ago , had asked to accompany her and ,in an uncharacteristic act of appeasement (that she now found incomprehensible but recognised must have been linked to some prior, indeterminate and deep-rooted sense of guilt relating to him), Guilia had agreed, an assurance that she had immediately regretted but could not now go back on. “Are you alright?” Anna , having paused in her drawing, had raised her head to address the question to Giulia. “Sorry, yes, just a stiff elbow” and with that Giulia made a show of rotating her shoulder and shifting her position before re-establishing herself , determined to cast the afternoon out of her thoughts, at least for now. An hour or so later Giulia left Anna alone in her studio and let herself out . Soon Giulia had crossed back on the ferry to Zattere before making her way through to the Academia Bridge , pausing on the way to get something to eat from one of the small cafes, and onto Palazzo Barbaro. Giovanni was waiting for her outside. Minutes later they had made their way down the entrance corridor and up the steep stairs and had now entered the piano nobile, Giulia leading the way. There were more people than Giulia had anticipated , mostly gathered at the far end of the room, and their bustle and the immediate and pervasive sense of agitation made far more of an impact upon her than the spectacle of the large, ornate room itself. Along the near wall and below a vast painting were a couple of straight-backed chairs and Guilia directed Giovanni to sit down on the nearest one, which he did, watching Giulia walk towards the other occupants as he did so, her heels echoing on the floor and competing with the light and air to fill the room. Giulia could see Sonia’s costumes on a rack in the far corner and a number of the Nanda Vigo mirrors suspended from boards that had been spread out across the room. It was immediately apparent to Giulia that the mirrors , exquisite as they were, were too small to have any chance of giving a dramatic counterpoint to the dresses and that this lack of proportion was made even more apparent by the size of the room and the much larger mirrors that already hung from its walls. But that was just “stuff” and there was always a way to sort that kind of thing. More pressing was the look on the face of the dark-haired , gamine model who was sitting on a big floor-rug, gazing intently at the cards spread out before her, exuding what might have been to some a look of bored contempt and to others a vexed and simmering dissatisfaction as she came yet again to the inescapable realisation that she was still just a hired body in a magnificent rented room and not the host or chatelaine. Giovanni watched Giulia approach the woman sitting on the rug (that seemed, from where he was sitting, to recede far into the background ,like Casorati had depicted in some of his early paintings , when he had been experimenting with optical planes), with the Louise Brooks haircut and the acid scowl ,like a grease stain on a cooker, and then watched as Guilia crouched down to engage her in conversation. Although Giovanni had never been in the room he knew it so well. So much had been a dress-rehearsal for just this moment. Squinting with one eye Giovanni tried to locate the spot on the floor , that could only have been a few feet in front of him, exactly where John Singer Sargent must have stood to paint the Curtis family in 1899, when he had returned to the home of a family that had offered him such crucial support and protection early on but that in subtle ways he had by then far outstripped . Why had Sargent chosen to depict Mrs Ariana Curtis at the centre of everything, but looking so wary and transfixed, a tiny black pit of tension above the bridge of her nose, as paralysed with horrified anxiety as a Bacon pope? Henry James, who knew the Curtis’, Sargent ,the Palazzo and the painting as well as anyone, had suggested to Ariana soon after the painting was finished that Sargent’s treatment of her face was “... an indication so sommaire that ...it speaks entirely for itself”, but surely those words , particularly the simultaneous attempt at elevation and obscurity of his resorting to French in this context, were not to be trusted? But there was more, much more. Giovanni , leaned back to take in the whole of the far side of the room, back to the wall , with its doorway in one corner that in the Sargent painting was figured as a black lozenge of sombre indeterminacy amidst the Velasquezian , golden-tinged light effects, ominously and portentously separating the young from the old . For some minutes Giovanni’s eyes criss-crossed the room ,back and forth, traversing the “real” space before him, occasionally pausing to rest on certain details, just as the viewers’ eyes had travelled across the invented space of Ilya Repin’s painting “the Unexpected Visitor” in Alfred Yarbus’ experiments of how people “took in” that painting through time. In his mind Giovanni attempted to plot out within the space before him the way that Sargent had painted the scene ,with behind Ariana’s right shoulder and far from the foreground, Eliza, the wealthy young American bride of Ariana’s middle-aged dilettante son, Ralph, also a painter and a couple of years senior to Sargent. Everyone in the room that day must have known that Ralph trailed far behind Sargent but only Ralph and Sargent knew the secrets that they shared. Sadly the table that Sargent had painted Ralph casually perched upon to Eliza’s right ( the same table that Ariana had been photographed at some ten years previously), was no longer to be seen. Giovanni pursed his lips as he recalled the way that Sargent had depicted Eliza beside her husband, dressed in virginal white ,albeit only recently widowed and soon to be a mother. If Ralph had had experiences that he might not want to share with Eliza then she might not have been conventionally innocent either...Then there had been the fourth person who Sargent portrayed, the once pugnacious but now more patrician and indulgent Daniel, sitting to Ariana’s left, his back to the sunlight that had somehow squeezed in through the windows and was now expanding into the otherwise shaded vastness of the “Cameron”, gazing at his open paper that seemed to be absorbing both him and much of the light . Giovanni’s mind spooled and tumbled on, shifting between the reality before him, his memory of the Sargent painting recalled from various reproductions, his partial knowledge of the biographic dynamics ,that underpinned the painting’s composition and gave purpose to its effects, and the various art-historical and rather desultory comparisons that Sargent’s tonal and painterly effects evoked , teasing out connections with earlier works and painters that were known to have influenced Sargent at that time. Giulia’s back was turned to Giovanni as she talked to the girl on the rug. Everyone else seemed focused on whatever it was that they were doing. Time was passing across the shiny , polished floor . What if he just got up , stepped across the marbled floor and stood for a moment where Sargent had once placed himself? “...I am so pleased for you. So tell me Simona, what do you see in the cards today?”. Simona looked up at Giulia, pausing fractionally longer than was perhaps customary, gazing solemnly into Giulia’s eyes before looking down again at the tarot cards strewn across the rug in front of her. “ It is not clear. The first cards troubled me to be sure. I felt that I was in the wrong place and that the cards were warning me, telling me to choose another path. Maybe it is this room, maybe it shares too many sadnesses, too many memories....but now ....now it seems , the pattern seems to change. See, here, the Empress has appeared and with her the hanged man and here is now to follow the Two of Swords, a very special card, at least for me.” “That is good to hear...Maybe , if you are ready and before we start, you should take one more?” “You think so? ....OK”. Simona picked up the pack and went to take a final card, but before she did so she raised herself up onto her knees and turned to face Guilia. “No, you choose” and with that Simona held up the pack , spreading them out in a narrow fan. Guilia inched closer to Simona . Touches of paleness, a collar bone disappearing beneath her black , round-necked top, a loose hair curled between her ear and shoulder; manicured finger nails lacquered in the palest pink.... Scent. Guilia took a card and placed it face down between them. Simona sat back on her heels and placed the remaining cards back into the box, before turning over Giulia’s card. “The two of cups. This will serve us well and makes it complete.” Simona smiled at Guilia, who returned the gift. “Come, let’s try the costumes”. Giulia stood up and made for the clothes rack expecting Simona to follow, but as she didn’t Giulia turned around, preparing to retrace her steps and help her to her feet. Simona was still on the rug but was now staring at Giovanni , who was standing some twenty feet away in the middle of the room , one eye shut staring at roughly where Simona was still sitting. “Hey you, stop that. How dare you look at me like that! Leave me alone!” With that Simona threw the box of cards across the floor , like Monica Vitti had thrown the cigarette case in Antonioni’s La Notte, direct to Giovanni’s feet. “Now you take one, then get out!” Giovanni could see Guilia in the far distance tense with anger and anxiety . What a mess. He bent down and picked up the box. Everyone had stopped , all was silent and everyone in the room was now looking at him. It was as if a pane of glass now separated Giovanni from their world. “Well” , thought Giovanni, ” honestly..., I’m caught in a game...but really, what harm have I done...?” Across the immensity of the room , Giovanni looked back at Guilia again , now standing next to Simona . Guilia returned his gaze but with a fierceness that Giovanni had never seen before from her, before crouching down and putting her arm around Simona’s shoulder. Slowly, Giovanni took out a card, glanced at it before placing it back in the box, face up and sliding it back to Simona. Simona opened the box, glanced at the card and dissolved into tears. Giovanni turned about and left the room , carefully closing the door behind him, and made his way out into the afternoon. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… This board is respectfully dedicated to the lives and work of Sonia Biacchi, Nanda Vigo and Anna Rossettini, with particular respect to the role of the C.T.R in Venetian cultural education. Appreciation is extended to Cabinet magazine for their survey of Alfred Yarbus’ eye movement experiments.