Read The Shape of a Pocket for Free Online

painting – used the same personal pronoun:
Toi, Tu, Esy, Ty … who is here.
This in part explains their immediacy.
    Looking at these ‘portraits’ which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy. The contract may be hard for us to grasp, but the look speaks to us, particularly to us today.
    If the Fayum portraits had been unearthed earlier, during, say, the eighteenth century, they would, I believe, have been considered as little more than a curiosity. To a confident, expansive culture these little paintings on linen or wood would probably have seemed diffident, clumsy, cursory, repetitive, uninspired.
    The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!
    Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.
    There is a second reason why the Fayum portraits speak today. This century, as has been pointed out many times, is
the
century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings.
    The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed, and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.
    The Fayum portraits touch a similar wound in a similar way. The painted faces, too, are flawed, and more precious than the living one was, sitting there in the painter’s workshop, where there was a smell of melting beeswax. Flawed because very evidently handmade. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.
    And so they gaze on us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.
    * A truly remarkable essay by Jean-Christoph Bailly on the Fayum portraits has just been published (1999) by Hazan, Paris, with the title:
L’Apostrophe Muette.

7
Degas

    There is love, he once said, and there is a life’s work and one only has one heart. So he chose. He put his heart into his life’s work. I hope to show to what effect.
    His mother, a French American from New Orleans, died when he, her first-born, was only thirteen years old. Apparently, no other woman ever entered into his emotional life. He became a bachelor, looked after by housekeepers. Due to the family banking business he had few material worries. He collected paintings. He was cantankerous. Was called ‘a terrible man’. Lived in Montmartre. During the Dreyfus Affair he assumed the conventional anti-Semitism of the average bourgeois. The later photos show a frail old man, kippered by solitude. Edgar Degas.
    What makes the story strange is that Degas’ art was supremely concerned with women and their bodies. This concern has been misunderstood. Commentators have appropriated the drawings and statues to