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“I don’t
understand, Monsieur Manet, why would you think that
anything has happened to this young lady.” The gendarme was finding it
difficult to make any sense of what the gentlemen was saying but you got all
sorts here in Gennevilliers. They come from the city
with their strange ideas. Across the
“Officer, I
was painting her picture, sitting here in the park…”
“In the outdoors, monsieur?”
“Yes, yes,
here in the park, with these other gentlemen…
“It looks
as if they are having a picnic.”
“Yes, of
course, that was the picture.”
“You were
painting a picture? Of a picnic?” The police officer tipped back his kepi, and
looked sceptical.
“Yes.”
“In the open air?”
“Yes.”
“And the
young lady wandered off.”
“Disappeared.”
“As you say, disappeared. I don’t understand though why she should have
disappeared. Perhaps she just remembered that there was something she had to
do? Perhaps she met a friend? Perhaps she will return soon? You know what girls
can be like monsieur? Why do you think that she didn’t just wander off?”
“Officer,
the girl was naked.”
“Naked, monsieur?”
“Naked officer. That is why I do not think she ‘just wandered off’.”
“Why were
you painting a naked girl at a picnic with these men?”
“That is
not the point officer, the point is that the girl is missing and without the
girl I cannot continue my painting.”
“Do not fear, monsieur. If you can rely on the Parisian gendarmerie
to do one thing, it is to find a naked girl in a park.”
Janine
Schenk was putting the finishing touches to her latest work, “SL”. She pulled
the protective goggles from her eyes but left the filter mask in place as she
peered intently at the painting’s minute details. A short blast from the air
brush added a tiny highlight at the corner of the classic dished top of a 1972
Mercedes 350 SL. Each tiny flaw in the original’s paint job was reproduced in
the painting. Every tiny fleck of rust in the chrome could be seen in the
picture. Every detail was perfect, super-real in every respect.
She looked
across at the print of ‘The F-111’ that hung on the wall of her studio and back
at her own work. Rosenquist would approve, she
thought.
Then the
window came in.
Janine
threw herself to the floor as bright blue splodges from a series of paint balls
spat themselves across the picture. She gasped in horror as the stream of paint
ball splatters edged across the floor of her studio, snaking towards her own
leg and slamming painfully into her thigh.
Then there
was the acrid smell of burning turpentine and linseed oil as a bottle with a
flaming rag at its neck burst the other window, showering glass and flaming
liquid all around Janine. She screamed as she leapt to her feet and fled the
burning room.
The
building was well ablaze by the time the fire service arrived. Janine sat
beside the road, sobbing with relief that she was still alive and with pain at
the loss of her work. She stared at the bright blue stain of the paint ball on
the thigh of her overall. She looked up at the fresh graffiti sprayed in the
same blue paint across the wall that faced her studio. One
word. “Pollock”.
Damn, she
thought, it’s the Abstract Expressionists. That is going to mean trouble.
They found
the girl from the picnic hanging in a cocoon of rope beneath a Japanese bridge
in a garden in Giverny, 80 kilometres away from where
she had disappeared. She was alive, still naked, shivering in the cold,
suspended inches from the surface of the water and the lilies that covered it. Wrapped in a knotted harness of Shibari
complexity she span slowly as the gendarmes tried to pull her to safety.
Spray
painted on the walkway of the bridge, bright crimson letters spelled out:
“Impressionists – It’s time you saw the light.”
and “Manet? Monet?
What’s The Difference? Money!”
The
Inspector of Police stared at the scene. It was clear that this was more than
some petty criminal at work. He didn’t trust these artists. So
emotional. So lacking in precise thought.
Perhaps it was some feud between factions. The Academié would have to be involved.
More artists! He thought irritably. There was one man that could be relied on
to look into this, though, even if he too was an artist. He would have to talk
to Breughel.
Two of his
officers had got a punt and were manoeuvring it under the bridge. The girl was
squealing as they tried to lower her into the punt. In time they succeeded.
Someone tossed a blanket from the bank to help keep the girl warm as they
brought her ashore. Removing the girl from the ropes that bound here took an
hour; each knot had been intricately tied.
The girl
wouldn’t return to the park. The painting remained unfinished.
Manet
felt discouraged. Seurat joked with him, trying to improve his mood. “Surely
you knew that impressionism would be no picnic.”
“Pollock?”
Pieter Breughel was taking the opportunity to gather as much evidence as he
could from the witnesses to the firebombing of Schenk’s studio. Janine was his
first port of call.
“That’s
right,” said Janine. “The one word. It must be the
abstract expressionists.”
“You
believe it is the work of them alone?” the quiet Dutchman quizzed the girl.
She’d found somewhere else to work. She was sitting cross legged on the floor,
her spray mask pushed down around her neck, her goggles up on the top of her
head, a smudge of paint across her right cheek. Her
paint stained overalls were unzipped slightly at the front. It was clear that
she had fallen out of bed and pulled them on without bothering with underwear.
He was finding it difficult to keep his mind on the job in hand. The air brush
compressor was still humming behind her. She was drinking tea from a thick
pottery mug. Funny, the Dutchman thought, I’ve never thought of an artist
taking a tea break.
“How can I
know?” she said. “Abstraction still has many adherents.”
“These
expressionists are too few. There must be others. Cubists
perhaps? Futurists? Maybe, at
worst, a grand coalition of modernists.”
“Could they
hope to defeat the traditional? Surely they realise that the cause of
abstraction is lost; that representational art is all that matters? Even the
surrealists have embraced Dali again.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. The Déjeuner
kidnapping points to those who resent the early representational roots of
impressionism, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I see
what you mean. But has your own work been attacked? Surely they would see you
as a leader for tradition?”
“They may
think that the day of the Flemish painters is gone; that we have lost our
influence. I surmise that they only attacked Manet
because his work remains representational in every respect even though others
from his group have more in common with the modernists. Today representational
art is the province of the pre-Raphaelites and
super-realists like yourself.”
The door
burst open. A man with expansive sideburns and wild eyes swept in. “It is
intolerable, intolerable!” he exclaimed.
More
trouble, Janine thought. What brings Rossetti here?
“She has
gone. It is the work of the modernists, I am sure. They know I cannot work
without my model.”
“Your model?”
“Lizzie. My model and my muse. I left her only for a moment. I am
painting her as Guinevere.”
The phone
rang, the Dutchman picked it up. “This is Breughel,” he said. “I see…. Yes, he
is here. … Of course. … We will be there at once.” He
put the phone down. “That was the police,” he said. “Outside the National
Gallery, a grey box has appeared on the vacant plinth. They want us to advise
them.”
“Advise
them! Pa!” Rossetti spat. “They have their own Critics, do they not? Can they
not recognise cubism when they see it?”
“Perhaps,
but they thought we should attend. They thought you should be there.”
“Why?
“It is what
is written on the box – ‘Medievalists!’ it says ‘Can You Not Think Outside The Box?’ – That is why they think you should see
it.”
The three
made their way to
The police
parted the crowds to allow the Dutchman and the others through. He peered at
the cube. “Break it open,” he called.
Two
officers leapt onto the plinth. With crow bars they levered up the top of the
box, sending splintering wood in all directions. “There is a girl inside,” one
of them called.
“I am not
surprised,” said the Dutchman. They watched as the helpless woman was pulled
from the box. It was Lizzie Siddal, still dressed in
the costume of Guinevere but bound with straps and silenced with an elaborately
embroidered length of cloth.
Freed from
her bonds, she fell sobbing into Rossetti’s arms.
Janine had
been standing in front of the picture for almost half an hour. It was a rare opportunity
to see one of Delacroix’s greatest works. She had wanted something to take her
mind off the events at the studio and the exhibition was achieving all she had
hoped for. On loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the picture dominated
the room in which it hung. In spite of its muddy muted tones, it managed to
convey the violence and desperation of the kidnapping vividly.
Janine
looked closely at the way in which the artist had rendered the scene, the way
in which the helpless girl lay, apparently unconscious, across the back of the
horse in the grip of her dark skinned abductor, the energy and animation in the
abductor’s horse. It was fascinating.
She heard a
man’s voice behind her. “Good morning, Miss Schenk,” it said, quietly and
politely. “Please don’t turn around and please don’t make any sudden move. If
you wish for no harm to come to yourself or to this picture, please move to the
exit to your right.” As if to emphasise the risk to herself and the painting,
she felt the prick of a knife blade against her arm. She did as she had been
asked.
The exit
led from the gallery into a deserted corridor. Janine heard the door slam
behind her and almost at once felt herself grabbed.
She tried to cry out but before she could a sweet, sickly-smelling pad was
clamped over her nose and mouth. The more she struggled, the quicker she
inhaled whatever it was on the pad and she felt herself slipping into
unconsciousness.
Her last
recollection was of her knees buckling beneath her as she slid to the hard wooden
floor of the corridor and dark oblivion.
© 2006 Freddie
Clegg
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