The Unknown Masterpiece Book

This is one of Balzac's little jewels.

From the very start Balzac sets its date and location. We are in 1612, in the early Regency of Maria de Medici, since only a couple of years had elapsed from the assassination of her husband and King Henri IV. Their son Louis XIII was then only eight years old. And the location is, as we can expect, Paris. But not just any place in Paris. We are in the Rue des Grands-Augustins, which is a perpendicular to the Boulevard of the same name which runs parallel to the Seine just across from the Ile-de-la-Cité.

The significance of this street is that this is where the young Louis XIII was almost immediately enthroned when his father died.



And the significance of having chosen this earlier period is that Balzac wrote his work soon after the Bourbon Monarchy had fallen. It is as if in choosing this past framework Balzac wanted to go back to a period of France that for him should have not ended.

There are two main characters who are real and famous. There is a young painter who is none other than Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and there is also the considerably older and now less well known painter François (Frans) Pourbus (1569-1622) who came from Flanders. As Balzac tells us, the latter had lost his place as court painter to his compatriot Rubens.

May be we are not surprised.

This is how Pourbus saw the Queen.




And this is how Rubens envisioned her husband welcoming her portrait.




Balzac is rendering homage to the street where the young Bourbon King was declared King by situating the art studio of Pourbus in the address of Nº 7, Rue des Grands-Augustins. But if the context is seventeenth century Paris, Balzac develops a discourse on art that reads very much like a nineteenth century criticism of the Art Salons. We have a fully developed debate between the Disegno & Colore or the classicists and the Romantics epitomized during Balzac's time by Ingres and Delacroix.

Colore



And Disegno




But even if Balzac also wrote regularly about the contemporary Salons, this is not just the writing of any art critic. This novella is couched in the very colorful, and rich and textured and delineated prose that is Balzac's inimitable writing. A true delight to read.

And yet, the novella is not even about these two poles in painting. It is not about these people, nor their times. It is about something else. It is about the relationship of the painter and his representation, or to be more specific, about him and his (female) sitter. Creation and possession, and the limitations and impossibilities in these.

And this is precisely what Pablo Picasso chose to focus on when the gallerist Ambroise Vollard asked him to illustrate Balzac's novel in 1931.



In his thirteen engravings we see Picasso exploring the role of artistic creation, its limitations and the ultimate goal of appropriation or possession.







For Picasso, his art and the implied window, a representational concept inherited from the Renaissance and through which he saw his world, was always framed by the female. We cannot be surprised then if he was fascinated by this Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, where Balzac says: Ce n'est pas une toile, c'est une femme! Une femme avec laquelle je pleure, je ris, je cause et je pens and cette femme nest pas une créature, c'est une création..


Picasso's framing women:




Illustrating the tale by Balzac was not enough. A few years after completing the series of etchings, Picasso moved his studio to Nº 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins.





To be able to photograph this warrants a new pilgrimage to my most beloved city.





And of course, Picasso also had to portray and render homage to his honored genius Honoré de Balzac.