"An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter"

Finally, a nice surprise from my to-read pile. Don't even recall when it got tucked in. César Aira's novella is both trenchant and spacious.

• His protector and principal patron was Charles XII of Sweden, the warrior king, whose battles he painted, following the armies from the hyperborean snows to sun-scorched Turkey.
• Napoleon’s fall ushered in a “century of peace” in Europe, so inevitably the branch of the profession in which the family had specialized went into decline.
• Rugendas was a genre painter. His genre was the physiognomy of nature, based on a procedure invented by Humboldt. The great naturalist was the father of a discipline that virtually died with him: Erdtheorie or La Physique du monde, a kind of artistic geography, an aesthetic understanding of the world, a science of landscape.
• The Humboldtian naturalist was not a botanist but a landscape artist sensitive to the processes of growth operative in all forms of life.
• Diogenes’ daylight lamp
• Everything in his pictures was bathed in simplicity, which gave them a pearly sheen, filled them with the light of a spring day.
• the engravings illustrating his Picturesque Voyage through Brazil had been printed on wallpaper and even used to decorate Sèvres china.
• their German clients, whom they regarded with a combination of respect and disdain so reasonable it could hardly offend,
• Dawn and dusk were vast optical explosions, drawn out by the silence. Slingshots and gunshots of sunlight rebounded into every recess.
• a new technique: the oil sketch. This was an innovation and has been recognized as such by art history. It was to be exploited systematically by the Impressionists only fifty years later; but the young German artist’s only precursors were a handful of English eccentrics, followers of Turner.
• A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star’s pace.
• And one day, suddenly, the carts set off . . . A week later, they were still a stone’s throw away, but sinking inexorably below the horizon.
• His artist’s imagination figured this second voyage as the other wing of a vast, mirrored butterfly.
• On the plains, space became small and intimate, almost mental.
• A natural or cultural scene, however detailed, gave no indication of how it had come into being, the order in which its components had appeared or the causal chains that had led to that particular configuration. And this was precisely why man surrounded himself with a plethora of stories: they satisfied the need to know how things had been made.
• After three weeks of assimilating a vast, featureless plain, to be told of a more radical flatness was a challenge to the imagination. It seemed, from what they could understand of the old hand’s scornful phrases, that, for him, the current leg of the journey was rather “mountainous.” For them, it was like a well-polished table, a calm lake, a sheet of earth stretched tight.
• There were attenuating circumstances: this was the first time he had crossed an area stricken by a plague of locusts. The Germans conferred in whispers. They were in a lunar ocean, rimmed around with hills.
• The air had turned a lead-grey color. He had never seen such light. It was a see-through darkness.
• It was still turning when a lightning bolt struck him on the head. Like a nickel statue, man and beast were lit up with electricity. For one horrific moment, regrettably to be repeated, Rugendas witnessed the spectacle of his body shining.
• From that moment on, like all victims of personalized catastrophes, he saw himself as if from outside, wondering, Why did it have to happen to me?
• The full battery of thunder exploded overhead. In a midnight darkness, broad and fine blazes interlocked. Balls of white fire the size of rooms rolled down the hillsides, the lightning bolts serving as cues in a game of meteoric billiards.
• Not only that, the horse’s magnetized coat held Rugendas in place as they flew through the air.
• he did not have to learn again, for he had lost none of his skill. It was another proof of art’s indifference; his life might have been broken in two, but painting was still the “bridge of dreams.”
• Which was not so easy: changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.
• It also changed color, or colors, becoming iridescent, full of violets, pinks and ochres, shifting constantly as in a kaleidoscope. Viewed from that protean rubber, the world must have looked different, thought Krause.
• In addition, the fragment’s outline could be affected by perspective. As small and as large as the Taoist dragon.
• This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other “wholes,” or because the “whole” made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden.
• Each set the tone for a different version, but all the versions were his. The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition “I am a monster”?
• In his work, Rugendas had come to the conclusion that the lines of a drawing should not represent corresponding lines in visible reality, in a one-to-one equivalence. On the contrary, the line’s function was constructive. That was why the practice of drawing remained irreducible to thought,
• Nature itself, preformed by the procedure, was already documentation. There were no pure, isolated data. An order was implicit in the phenomenal revelation of the world; the order of discourse shaped things themselves.
• In the streams there were siren-like molluscs and, at the bottom, always swimming against the current, legions of pink salmon the size of lambs.
• first time she had been through this exercise and it no longer scared her. They even exchanged jokes; the hardy pioneers made light of the absurdity of the age. Their scale of values accommodated the most outrageous nuisances. For them, the Indians were simply part of reality.
• with the mantilla covering his face. It hid the damage. Although, of course, that was not why he had chosen to wear it. He had wanted something to filter the light.
• It was as if he had taken another step into the world of his paintings.
• There was not a cloud in the sky; the air had a lyrical resonance; birds were combing the trees. The lid had been taken off the world specifically to reveal the conflict, the clash of civilizations, as at the dawn of history.
• Having a partner was a way of outliving oneself, in life and in death.
• The detail that fascinated them was the brevity of it all, the way organization emerged from chance, the speed of the organization. The procedure of the combat between Indians and white men mirrored that of the painters: it was a matter of exploiting the balance between proximity and distance.
• They were starting to feel that there were Indians everywhere. As is often the case with collectors, the problem was not a lack but an excess of specimens.
• It was like wandering from room to room at a party, from the living room to the dining room, from the bedroom to the library, from the laundry to the balcony, all full of noisy, happy, more or less drunk guests, looking for a place to cuddle or trying to find the host to ask him for more beer. Except that it was a house without doors or windows or walls, made of air and distance and echoes, of colors and landforms.
• And that was indeed how it would be, for the magic of drawing turns everything into a volume, even air.
• In everyday life there were explanations for everything, and in abnormal circumstances, there were explanations for the explanations.
• The next display took extravagance to the limit: the “captive” was an enormous salmon, pink and still wet from the river, slung across the horse’s neck, clasped by a muscular Indian, who was shouting and laughing as if to say: “I’m taking this one for reproduction.”
• All these scenes were much more like pictures than reality. In pictures, the scenes can be thought out, invented, which means that they can surpass themselves in terms of strangeness, incoherence and madness. In reality, by contrast, they simply happen, without preliminary invention.
• the viewer could come as near as he liked, subject them to a microscopic scrutiny. And that would bring out the hidden strangeness: what would be called “surrealism” a hundred years later but was known, at the time, as “the physiognomy of nature”; in other words, the procedure.
• but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction (even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection)
• And Humboldt had developed his procedure in places like Maiquetía and Macuto . . . in the midst of that peculiarly tropical sadness: night falling suddenly, without twilight, the sea washing back over Macuto again and again, futile and monotonous, the children always diving from the same rock . .
• What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else’s mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing happens with a painter and the visible world. It was happening to Rugendas. What the world was saying was the world.
• The artist, as artist, could always be already dead. There was something absurd about trying to preserve his life. An accident, big or small, could kill a man, or a thousand, or a thousand million men at once. If night were lethal, we would all die shortly after sunset. Rugendas might have thought, as people often do: “I have lived long enough,” especially after what had happened to him. Since art is eternal, nothing is lost.
• He was the focal point of that waking nightmare, the realization of the terrifying possibility that had haunted the raid in its various manifestations over the years: physical contact, face to face.