Back in September 2015 we started reading and thinking about Fanny Claus, Manet, Baudelaire and the motif of the balcony. We wondered about making links with Manet’s painting in the Quai d’Orsay ……about visiting Boulogne where Manet manet first may have had the idea of the balcony painting, about links with Goya, about Baudelaire’s flaneur in Paris and about light and dark, inside and outside, about the protection and danger of the balcony, about painting and contemporary digital art.
sketching with ballustrades and mirrors
One thread of early research lead us to thinking about the strange perspectives in Manet’s work e.g. Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=000904&cHash=0ac4f8868a
and the debate about Manet’s the Bar the Folies-Bergère
http://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/impressionism-post-impressionism/edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere
– is the view possible or not? – having always understood that the perspective was thought to be impossible and part of the mystery, meaning and of the importance of the painting we were interested to come across this link http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/looking_glass.html which demonstrates an angle of view that might make the picture possible…
In any event, the final impression of the compositions in some of Manet’s work, including the Portrait of Mlle Claus, is widely recognised as uneasy, almost a collection of collaged perspectives, which presents a new ‘Modern’ sensiblity, detached and isolating… it seemed important to root our work in the contemporary as much as the past
Ideas about lighting, viewer and composition continued to develop as we read Foucault’s “Manet and the Object of Painting” ………. his idea that the bright flatness of the front-on lighting on Manet’s models implicates the viewer – who was previously concealed in the darkness of the theatrical lighting of chiaroscuro – in a direct and confrontational line of view, that in part explains the outraged public response to works such as Olympia, and Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe….. this prompted a line of thought in our research that might have continued into the territory of exploring ‘the Gaze’ – on the balcony, who/what are we looking at, at what and how is Fanny looking, how is the painter looking at her?….and then the research took another turn.
Photograph of Sophie Prins Gapinski http://iswinoujscie.pl/artykuly/15082/ http://www.cultureinside.com/348/section.aspx/ViewProfile/5976
On a web search we discovered that Fanny Claus played in the first ever all-woman string quartet, which had great success and in a website, http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/ an independent research institute specializing in musicological women’s studies we found that she had great great grand-daughter still alive, a painter, who had recently had an exhibition in France in a gallery in Cordes sur Ciel, in the Tarn district, close to brook & black’s studio, in the same gallery where Tiffany had organised a show of her mother, Jacqueline Black’s paintings a few years ago.
This descendant of Fanny Claus, Sophie Prins Gapinski, was the same age as us, and was living in Paris. We left messages through emails on several websites that may have been able to contact her, and then struck success through telephoning the mayor of Cordes and asking if Sophie’s email could be sent to us from the gallery records. We were in contact.
The violent events in Paris in November, asserted a darker backdrop to the project and brought the focus back to the present context and tension in so many of our cities’ streets…..and when we eventually organised to visit Sophie in January, on the drive to Paris we passed the gathering mass of people at Calais, police, wire, fences …when we arrived at Sophie and her husband Tadeusz’s flat in Boulogne Billiancourt, for the first part of our visit the conversation circled around the current anxieties and tensions, the movements of people and the Syrian war.
Sophie and Tadeusz Gapinski
On arriving at Sophie’s home we were surprised by another ‘coincidence’. We had decided by this point to ask Sophie to continue a line of work that brook & black had used in previous installations:
painting on the picture glass – early sketch
the motif of the woman who paints onto the glass of a window or screen, and then having painted herself out of the picture, cleans the surface to re-emerge from the painted surface.
We had planned to ask Sophie if we could video her squeezing paint from the tube out onto the window/picture glass in front of her and then start to paint. It was a jolt of surprise to walk into her flat – before we had even talked about the work – to see this image in her living room.
Beyond this visual surprise we could never have predicted or hoped that Sophie and Tadeusz would be as welcoming, enthusiastic and helpful as they were, and that Sophie would have played her part so imaginatively and sensitively, creating, undirected, moments in the video that are really poetic and surprising, and for finding and reading the text that forms part of the soundwork for the installation in Gallery 65. We cannot thank them enough and we are really delighted that they are both coming over to see the work on the week of Live Friday.
Wow! I don’t think the Ashmolean ever expected 4 years of such an amazingly diverse, inspirational, inclusive celebration of people, art and portraiture when we started the campaign to ‘Save Manet for the Nation’ in 2012.
Beyond the Balcony has been such a fitting way to end the activities around Manet’s Portrait of Fanny Claus: to explore and focus on the person behind the artwork, the portrait, the sitter and the viewer. Guiding the people in the MIND and Young Dementia UK groups, brook & black gave everyone the opportunity to see how artists work, to be part of the processes involved when responding to existing work and then creatively bringing responses together to culminate in digital videos and installations.
The artists also helped the museum refocus the work around Manet, giving community engagement a higher profile in the galleries, in large scale public events (the May LIVE Friday) and to rethink how we use the gallery spaces for people to be creative and respond to both the work and spaces of the museum. Through their workshops of photography, poetry, collage and video (using a green screen), they gave a solid platform for people to actively participate in art and in the Ashmolean: giving people the opportunity to experience the museum more confidently.
Most importantly, at the centre of all the activity was everyone’s individual stories and experiences. Beyond the Balcony was not only perfect approach of accessing art, portraiture, the museum: it encouraged us to look beyond the interpretation often presented to us as an audience at the stories behind the paintings and reflect and present our own stories. What is our connection with other artworks on display?
This week we installed the final artwork in Gallery 65 of the Ashomolean – it was a week of excitement – as the installation began to take shape and we saw that it would work as we had thought, tension – as various technical snagging problems threatened to hold up the realisation, and eventually exhilaration as it all came together.
