An art gallery
An art gallery. History of a Painting ( Un Cabinet d'amateur ) is a novel by Georges Perec published in 1979 by Editions Balland (Paris). The German translation by Eugen Helmlé was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 1989 .
content
In 1913, the art collection of the German-American brewer Hermann Raffke is exhibited in Pittsburgh . The central work of this exhibition is the painting Ein Kunstkabinet by Heinrich Kurz. As the printed exhibition catalog describes, it shows Hermann Raffke together with numerous pictures from his collection - including the painting Ein Kunstkabinet by Heinrich Kurz. The detailed picture in the picture repeats itself over and over again, as the exhibition visitors see with magnifying glasses, until the art gallery depicted on it appears only the size of a pin. However, the repetitions are subject to small changes: “On a Longhi , suddenly, from one reduction to the next, the previously empty piazza is populated by masks; Donkeys, veiled women, then dromedaries disappear one after the other from a Moroccan landscape ; the battered boxer gets an uppercut in the next picture , in the last one he is knocked out on the ground. ”The number of impressed visitors increases so much that there is a fight. When the painting is the victim of an ink attack, Raffke has it removed from the exhibition. A little later Raffke dies and, according to his will, is prepared by taxidermists . In the same clothes and pose as in the painting An Art Cabinet , the corpse is placed in a burial chamber which is faithfully reproduced in the art cabinet and in which Raffke's favorite pictures hang. His heirs have experts compile a catalog of the remaining collection for auction. The works of Lucas Cranach the Elder , Giorgione , Frans Hals and Jan Vermeer in particular receive very high bids at the auction . Two years after the auction, Raffke's nephew Humbert contacted the buyers and informed them that all the paintings were forgeries . The entire action turns out to be the perfidious revenge of his uncle, who had previously been betrayed by art experts and art sellers for years.
Motifs
The main motive of Un Cabinet d'amateur is deception . Most of the paintings are not just forgeries in the novel, but are also made up by Perec. Art- historical legends and fictitious proof of provenance give them potential authenticity . The painting “ The Downfall of the House of Usher by Frank Staircase” derives its immediate impression of fame from the title of a story by Edgar Allan Poe . These strategies of turning the paintings into seemingly priceless works of art are on the one hand part of the revenge of the deceived amateur art collector Raffke, on the other hand an integral part of Perec's game of deception: the wrong mixed with the true, book titles are paintings, writers are painters, historical personalities like the former governor of Nevada , John Sparks , blend in with the fictional events as if they were part of it. Perec plays with the media and the illusion vs. Reality to the extreme and in the end lets his entire construction collapse by itself by depicting “most of the details of this fictional narrative [as] devised solely for the pleasure and tickling of beautiful appearances” ( Ein Kunstkabinett , p. 109).
Furthermore, Perec works with the motif of the destruction of art . The main work of the novel, the painting An Art Cabinet , is destroyed by a visitor to the exhibition, as is the Kodak factory with its photo plates and films . In the novel, the (false) art critic Lester Nowak writes about Kurz's painting "one shouldn't be fooled: this work is a reflection of the death of art, a mirror reflection of this world condemned to the endless repetition of its own models" (p. 31) . The narrated story of the painting also ultimately falls victim to destruction by exposing itself to be false.
illustration
On the dust jacket is a reproduction of the painting Un Cabinet d'amateur (1980/81) by Isabelle Vernay-Lévêque. It reproduces the art gallery described in the novel.
expenditure
- Un Cabinet d'amateur , Editions Balland, Paris 1979/1988.
- An art cabinet , Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich / Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-446-15408-6 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Cover text from the Hanser edition from 1989.