The lost picture

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The lost picture (original title: Headlong ) is a novel by the British author Michael Frayn from 1999. He makes use of the fact that one of the pictures of the seasons by Pieter Bruegel the Elder was probably lost years ago to tell a fictional story which starts from the discovery of this painting, expands the intrigue between finder and owner to a satirical cultural “ clash ” between town and country, intellect and peasant cunning, and which occasionally invites the reader to (art) historical excursions.

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The London philosopher Martin Clay took a sabbatical year to indulge his passion, art history. He wants to write a book on the influence of nominalism on Dutch painting in the 15th century, but he has allowed himself to be distracted by another, more attractive subject. Now he still has five months - high time to concentrate all his energy on the project. Accompanied by his wife Kate, an art historian by profession, and their little daughter Tilda, this should succeed in their secluded country house. No sooner have he got there than he lets himself be distracted again. Their neighbor Tony Churt, a long-established country nobleman, invites the Clays to dinner because he has a request. In order to save his dilapidated property, he wants to sell four paintings from the family estate and asks them for their expert judgment. The first three elicit polite generalities from Martin; at the fourth, least appreciated by the landlord and abused as a fireplace cover, he hastily evades. He's struck by lightning. What he “recognizes” is a picture that he actually cannot know, including no other, with the exception of the master himself - a masterpiece whose existence is only suspected and whose discovery would be an incredible sensation. It is the sixth painting from the cycle of seasons by Pieter Bruegel the Elder .

The Bruegel Hall in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna was also the place where Martin's passion for painting was ignited. Hence his confidence that his intuition will guide him correctly. Instinctively also the impulse to hide from the landlord which treasure might be his own. Martin throws himself “upside down” (as the title is in the English original) in order to find out whether his hypothesis will be confirmed or not. In addition to the numerous reference works that he tries to do, he actually needs the picture, but on the other hand he wants to avoid the owner becoming suspicious and has to accept that he would spend days speculating more than researching. There are other problems. Does the naive Tony Churt play a double game? Is he the rightful owner at all? How to deal with his much younger, more attractive wife Laura and her attempts at seduction? And how to win his own wife Kate for his daring game? After all, Martin wants to cheat a fraudster. The former speculates to save taxes and commissions by selling to private collectors ; Martin, on the other hand, pretends to know interested customers so that Tony gives him a free hand and he can secretly get hold of the Bruegel. Not for yourself privately, but ultimately for the benefit of the public; but this noble end justifies in his eyes all questionable and unfair means, which he subsequently uses.

Martin only keeps a clear head when he pursues new traces of research, whereby the historical context in which the seasonal pictures were created increasingly imposes itself on him, including a bold thesis that would explain why it was no coincidence that this painting of all things disappeared. Of course, he still cannot check it. Tony's suddenly appearing brother, who disputes his inheritance, increases the pressure to finally act. Martin rushed to sell the first painting Tony most admired, well below the minimum amount he had promised him. In order not to arouse his displeasure, he pays the difference by going into debt to his bank and also to Kate and Laura. Tony has already commissioned another art connoisseur with the sale of the remaining three paintings ... After that, events roll over. Triggered by Laura's intervention, Martin throws himself into a wild adventure in which he first steals the wrong and then the right picture - only to lose it in the end, irretrievably, for him as well as for the entire art world, and before he succeeds To obtain certainty whether his last bold thesis will be confirmed and thus, from his point of view, also the authenticity of "his" Bruegel.

analysis

The picture

Martin's research initially focuses on the question of what place the picture he discovered has taken in Bruegel's cycle of seasons . First he clarifies the number of paintings that have been lost. Is it even seven? This thesis is supported by researchers who assume that the series originally comprised twelve images, one for each month. Martin takes the side of the interpreters, who attribute this to a misunderstanding on the part of Bruegel's client, Nicolaes Jonghelinck , and builds on the sources that noted six images each time the first two changes of ownership were made. That would also correspond to the number of seasons that were differentiated in the Netherlands at the time . Martin assumes that there is really only one picture missing. Where does it belong now? To this end, he examines how research assigns the five existing paintings (not named after the seasons of the time) to specific double months. Although he notes that the views on this sometimes differ considerably, he also discovers a gap that remains almost entirely free: April / May. That fits with what he saw the first time he looked at the lost picture. It shows a landscape in spring.

The reader, who compares fiction with reality, can easily see that Martin has so far been completely within the framework of what is generally recognized by Bruegel research. Anyone who feels invited to take part in their research will also find out, among other things, that neither a title nor any description of the missing picture has survived. This fact gives the author who tries his hand at it the greatest possible freedom, and the experienced reader - of what Martin sees in this picture - the knowledge that he is looking at pure fiction:

“I look down from a wooded height into a valley that extends diagonally through the picture from the bottom left; a river meanders through the valley, past a village, past a castle perched on a rock, to a distant city by the sea, close to a high horizon. To the left of the valley is a rugged mountain range with rugged peaks. There is still snow in the high side valleys. It's spring. The first green of April shimmers on the trees below the snow line. In the higher elevations the air is still cold, but the further you go down into the valley, the milder it becomes; the cool, brilliant shades of green transform into a deeper and deeper blue, and for the viewer, whose gaze wanders into increasingly southern, sunnier regions, April gradually turns to May.

In a clearing I see some clumsy figures breaking flowering white branches from the trees or just about to dance a crude wooden shoe dance. A bagpiper sits on a tree stump. You almost think you can hear the stern pentatonic snarling. People dance because it's spring again and because they got through winter.

Further back, a herd of cattle is driven over steep mountain slopes to the alpine pasture.

Right in front of me, half hidden by bushes, only observed by a bird sitting on a branch, I discover a little chubby man with two wild daffodils, who presses his funny snout of a little chubby woman on the funny snout.

And again the gaze wanders, and the heart with it, out into the infinite depth of the picture, into ever deeper blue, into the blue sea and the blue sky above. The last clouds dissolve in the warm west wind. A sailing ship is heading for the warm south. "

- Michael Frayn : The lost picture

Martin's research shows, among other things, that the Julian calendar was still in force during Bruegel's lifetime and that the beginning of the year fell on March 25th. From this he concludes that the lost picture must have been the first in the painter's conception.

Emergence

In contrast to most of his other works, Michael Frayn remembers, according to his own admission, in minute detail how and where the idea for the present novel came about. It was in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien , in the Bruegel Hall, while looking at the three seasonal pictures located there, specifically at the moment when he read the accompanying text with the reference to three more: one in Prague , the other in New York and the sixth - lost. He immediately began to speculate. Assuming that this vanished image still exists, would it not be conceivable that it could be stored somewhere undetected, with someone who does not hide it at all, but simply does not know what is in his possession? And further assuming that it would be “recognized” at some point, how would the discoverer act? Wouldn't it be prudent of him to leave the owner in his ignorance - so as not to arouse his greed, which could lead him to sell it to the highest bidder, whereby it would be lost to the public immediately, and perhaps forever?

Narrative perspective

Frayn also allows his protagonist Martin to claim altruistic motives like this. He shares his passion for painting with him anyway, including his special affinity for and connoisseurship with Bruegel, which enables Martin at the decisive moment to recognize an apparently incorrectly attributed painting as the lost seasonal image in a flash. Or is it perhaps more that he wants to recognize it as such ? Is his knowledge really profound and his motivation honest? - Frayn relies on the active, critical reader who wants to come up with questions like these himself. In order to set this in motion, he confronts him directly with the perspective of his protagonist, so he carefully chooses the perspective of a first-person narrator .

The protagonist

What binds Martin to his profession as a philosopher is even more indefinite than his age (35, 40?). Perhaps it is the freedom that it offers him - among other things, the freedom to be free from it for a year to pursue his passion as an art historian. He evades the self-imposed commitment to his plan to write a book in this field by first biting into another art-historical topic and then into conquering the image. The first excuse definitely turns out to be an obsession; whether the "Bruegel" is one remains open, which is his own fault.

Martin has not yet grounded the bond with his wife and child. Even retreating to her country estate doesn't let him calm down. As soon as they are there, he is drawn away again, first to the neighbors, then back to London for research . To get to the train station he has to harness his wife Kate, not without scruples, but also without fear of repetition, and often enough without her knowing what exactly he is doing there. Not even he knows exactly what drives him; Perhaps the “ imprint ” he experienced years ago in the Kunsthistorisches Museum was aimed neither at art, nor at art history, nor at Bruegel, but at this missing image - the desire to discover it and thus become famous and rich.

Martin and Kate are intellectually equal, but fundamentally different in temperament. Kate is writing a standard work on art history. The way in which she does this - patient, disciplined, calm, factual - are qualities that he himself lacks and that he sees in her with mixed feelings. The fact that he, the layman , feels superior to her, the professional, stems from the fact that she is content with iconography , while he sees himself as an iconologist . From his point of view this means: she is content with facts, whereas he interprets them; she only collects what is well known while he discovers new territory - and not just the lost image, but with him a steep thesis that opens up a whole new view of the seasonal images.

The thesis

What does not leave him in concrete terms is the peculiarity that the unmistakably cheerful tone of the cycle does not at all want to match the gloomy political conditions in which it was created. Martin reads and feels at home in Bruegel's world - with the result that he considers it possible that the painter might very well have belonged to a secret Protestant sect and supported the local " Resistance " against the Spanish occupiers. That leads him straight to his bold thesis. What he suddenly has in his mind's eye on “his” picture is the changed perception of a little man on the edge of the action: He is not, as he previously believed, briefly submerged or rescued, he is drowned, and with between them Kneel with head tied.

If Martin's “vision” is confirmed upon inspection of the picture, this would allow several conclusions: The depicted scene would be a reference to a killing method introduced by the occupying forces in 1565; it would ironically portray the entire cycle ; the appearance of the apolitical would be refuted; the disappearance of this image of all things could be justified by this. In addition, the artist's subversive act would also impressively confirm the dictum “Bruegel painted many things that could not actually be painted”, which Martin made a kind of leitmotif for his research.

epilogue

A year after Martin's attempt to “save” the picture for posterity ended in its being lost forever, he draws a kind of epilogue to take stock. His opinion of this image and its meaning for himself has changed with each season of the year over the course of the year. Now he's finished. He wants the present book to be understood as a preventive confession with which he is responsible to posterity. In a way, it includes the topic he actually wanted to write about, nominalism , because for him personally it was about the fixation on a single object.

After he has overcome that, Martin seems to be gradually arriving - in "normalism", as he self- deprecatingly scolded . Kate has not separated from him, both are even considering a second child; Laura left Tony as planned, is now going her own way and is still on friendly terms with Martin. “Whatever becomes of the supposed or real Bruegel in the end,” sums up one critic, “Martin has long since become part of another 'picture' that just as stubbornly eludes his interpretation as the painting from the sixteenth century: He stands in the middle the landscape of his life. "

literature

  • Michael Frayn: The lost picture. German by Matthias Fienbork; Hanser, Munich, Vienna, 1999, ISBN 3-446-19778-8
  • Michael Frayn: The lost picture. German by Matthias Fienbork; Paperback; dtv, Munich, 2001, ISBN 978-3423203968
  • Michael Frayn: Headlong. Henry Holt & Company Inc, New York, 1999, ISBN 978-0805062854 (English)
  • Michael Frayn: Pretmakers in een berglandschap. Bert Bakker, Amsterdam, 1999, ISBN 9789035120556 (Dutch)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Frayn: The lost picture. German by Matthias Fienbork; Paperback; dtv, Munich, 2001, pp. 79-83
  2. ↑ Compare u. a. Special page for the seasonal pictures as part of the Vienna Bruegel exhibition 2018/19.
  3. ↑ Michael Frayn: The lost picture. German by Matthias Fienbork; Paperback; dtv, Munich, 2001, pp. 45/46
  4. ↑ a b Shusha Guppy: Michael Frayn. The Art of Theater. The Paris Review, 2003, accessed November 26, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Thomas Wagner: Dr. Bruegel or How to paint. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 12, 1999, accessed on November 26, 2018 .