The article, when it did appear, was everything he could have wished. It was soberly, indeed elegantly written, without any of the gee-whiz enthusiasm Ross had shown when he told Francis what he was about to do. It was modest in tone: this very fine picture, hitherto unknown, had at last come to light, and except for Drollig Hansel it was the only example from the brush of The Alchemical Master, whoever he might be. He must have been known to the Fuggers, and to Graf Meinhard, and these facts and the quality of the painting put it with the best of the Augsburg group, of whom Holbein had been the finest master. Was The Alchemical Master a pupil or associate of Holbein? It was more than likely, for Holbein had delighted in pictures that offered concealed messages to those who had the historical knowledge and the flair to read them. Fuller explication of the iconographic intricacies of the masterpiece Ross was happy to leave to scholars of greater insight than himself.
It was a fine article, and it caused a sensation among those who cared about such things, which meant several hundred thousand professional critics, connoisseurs, and that large body of people who could never hope to own a great picture, but who cared deeply for great pictures. Perhaps best of all, it offered a fine colour reproduction of the triptych as a whole, and a detailed picture of each of its three parts. The Marriage at Cana, now dated and explicated, became art history, and Francis (the Mercurial Francis, not the possessor of the tormented Catholic-Protestant conscience) was overjoyed.
The Countess refused all subsequent requests to examine the picture. She was, she said, too old and too busy with her great farm to oblige the curious. Did she smell a rat? Nobody ever knew. Thou shalt perish ere I perish.
The article destroyed Francis forever as a painter. Clearly he could not go on in the style which he had, with so much pain and under the whip of Saraceni, made his own. The danger was too great. But with the perversity of his Mercurial aspect, he now found himself eager to paint again. He had done nothing since the end of the war except amuse himself with a few drawings in the Old Master manner and executed with his Old Master technique. After Ross’s article appeared he enlarged his portfolio of sketches in this style that had been preliminary studies for The Marriage at Cana; created them, so to speak, after the fact. They had to be kept locked up. Now he wanted to paint. The obvious thing—he had grown fond of Ross’s word “obvious”—was to learn to paint in a contemporary style. He bought new, ready-made paints and canvases prepared by an artist’s supplier, and remembering his early enthusiasm for Picasso he set to work to find a style related to that of the greatest of modern painters, but which would be the true style of Francis Cornish.
That could never have been easy but it became wholly impossible after Picasso made a statement to Giovanni Papini, which was included in an interview that appeared in Libro Nero in 1952. The Master said:
In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessences, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understood me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.
He lost no time in bringing this interview to the attention of Ross. He had to translate it, because Ross had only a smattering of tourist-Italian; he was always meaning to learn the language properly, so that he could read things like Libro Nero, but he never did so.
“What do you make of that?” said Francis.
“I make nothing whatever of it,” said Ross. “You know how artists are; they have bad days and fits of self-doubt and self-accusation when they think their work is rubbish, and abase themselves before the artists of the past. Often they are trying to coax whoever they are talking to into contradicting them—giving them new assurance. I suppose Papini, whoever he may be, caught Pablo on a bad day, and took all that rubbish for his real opinion.”
“Papini is a rather well-regarded philosopher and critic. He doesn’t write to create sensations and I am certain he would have asked Picasso to reread and consider such a statement as this before he published it. You can’t brush it aside as a passing comment, made in a fit of depression.”
“Yes I can. And I do. Listen, Frank: when you want opinions about an artist’s work you don’t ask the artists for them. You ask somebody who knows about art. A critic, in fact.”
“Oh, come on! Do you really think artists are inspired simpletons who don’t know what they’re doing?”
“Artists have tunnel vision. They see what they are doing themselves, and they are plagued by all sorts of self-doubt and misgivings. Only the critic can stand aloof and see what’s really going on. Only the critic is in a position to make a considered and sometimes a final judgement.”
“So Picasso doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about Picasso?”
“You’ve put your finger on it. He is talking about Picasso the man—troubled, influenced by ups and down in his health, his love-life, his bank account, his feelings about Spain—everything that makes the man. When I talk about Picasso I talk about the genius who painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the master of every genre, the Surrealist, the visionary who painted the prophetic Guernica—one of the greatest things to come out of this rotten era—The Charnel House, the whole bloody lot. And about that Picasso, the mere man Picasso knows bugger-all, because he is sitting inside himself and has too close a view of himself. About the artist Picasso I know more than Pablo Picasso does.”
“I envy your assurance.”
“You’re not a critic. You’re not even a painter. You’re a craftsman, a creation of that old scamp Saraceni. And you ought to understand this, Frank, because it’s part of the truth. A very big part of it. Too much rides on the reputation of Picasso to allow any rubbish like that interview to rock the boat.”
“Money, you mean? Fashion in taste?”
“Don’t be cynical about fashion in taste. Among other things, art is very big business.”
“But what about what he says about seeking consolation and exaltation in art?”
“That was the fashion of an earlier day. That was probably true about the Age of Faith, which has been bleeding badly ever since the Renaissance, and which got its death blow with the revolutions in America and France. The Age of Faith took a deadly disease from the Reformation. Ever see a really great picture inspired by Protestantism? But the passing of the Age of Faith didn’t mean the death of art, which is the only immortal, everlasting thing.”
“But he says in so many words that he was serving fashion, pleasing the crowd, devising absurdities and puzzles.”
“Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? What he says is rubbish. It’s what he does that counts.”