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27 January (updated 10 February)
When Russell Hoban published his novel The Medusa Frequency in 1987, the dust-jacket bore an enhanced version of Vermeer’s painting Head of a [Young] Girl, as here
The painting was not referred to as Girl with a Pearl Earring*, because it was not called that then – Tracy Chevalier did not publish her novel, using that description, for another twelve years – but so popular has the title become since the book (1999) and the film (2003) that even the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where the painting ‘normally’ hangs (it’s not there when Hermann Orff, in the novel, goes to see it), is using it in favour of the name employed by Hoban (or Girl in a Turban and variants thereof, although Orff also does call her The Vermeer girl.
Looked at objectively, yes, the earring is there, but to assume (as the description does) that it is not one of a pair seems over-precise or even fanciful (as if the other side of the girl’s head-dress or even head may not be there, because we cannot see it), and, in comparison with the turban, the earring is not the most obvious thing in the painting, unless you are Chevalier and want to make it the centre of a mystery and a story concerning it, of course. (And several easily available images show her wearing earrings (plural), too.) Historical novelists do such things, after all.
Of course, a model for the painting might only wear the earring that can be seen, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t hold out to wear them both – just this once. I forget what Hoban has Orff say about the painting, but it is notable, amongst Vermeer’s work (it is thought to date to around 1665, ten years before his death), not only for not having a background, but also for having the face and upper body appear in complete darkness, save the light that we can see reflected from the young woman.
However, other models appear with not just jewelry, but pearls, such as the Woman with a Pearl Necklace (thought to be slightly earlier), which she seems to be holding out for someone the other side of the window to see (unless she can see her reflection in a mirror to the left), who also has earrings
So does the Portrait of a Young Woman (thought to be a couple of years later), but she has more elfin-like features than our Scarlett Johannson lookalike (but the same dark background)
Other than cashing in on notoriety, then, is there any real reason to have renamed with a title that does not exclusively describe the Hoban / Chevalier portrait, just because the latter writer gained attention by using it ? Could we imagine retitling the later works of Gorky to which André Breton helped him give names – I think that One Year the Milkweed and The Liver is the Cock’s Comb might have come out of that collaboration, but maybe they did not know best, and some marketing people could find even better names, which would have people search out these canvases worldwide.
We already have Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même more conveniently known as The Large Glass, and then existing in multiple forms thanks to Richard Hamilton’s work and Duchamp’s endorsement.
On that precedent, artists who have sometimes used names, as Roni Horn has for drawings, that do not say very much, or others who, worse, insist on pieces being just Untitled, could have official titlers who go around after them, fixing them with names for good PR…
Post-script
Of course, it has been known to be done before, but not in this Chevalier-type way :
1. The sitter is Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of Francesco
2. Thus the punning Italian title, La Gioconda (which is La Jaconde, in French), because the feminine form of the surname means one who is jocund
3. The form of address 'my lady', madonna, came, at that time, to be contracted to mona (though, nowadays, monna)
4. Therefore Mona Lisa - and not a historical novelist in sight, coming up with a new name, based on earrings...
End-notes
* Though, rather foolishly (I feel), the official Russell Hoban web-site does use that name.
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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25 July
These are some further thoughts about what meaningful message, if any, is given to the public by talking about the stigma of mental ill-health*.
I suspect little more (and who judges a book by its cover - don't we all?) than titles of texts such as, being quite random, The Tao of Pooh, The Road to Wigan Pier, The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Lady Windermere's Fan.
Yes, they identify something, and not always exclusively: for example, film convention is to write Psycho (1960), not least as it was re-made**.
Do titles / names do any more than identify***? Only, I feel, if they are apt, rather than arbitrary (remember the times when no one knew what counselling was, and everyone had to explain that they weren't seeing a counsellor to get advice?): as my footnote says, the titles that Breton gave to Gorky's paintings seem apt, as does The Canterbury Tales.
Contrast that with The Merchant of Venice, because many people (we have probably all still heard of Shylock) would be pressed to say who the person is to whom the title relates. Do we want that sort of confusion, if we are talking about the very real effects that other people's attitudes (not always conscious) have on almost every detail of the lives of people with an experience of mental ill-health?
For those attitudes get translated into a behaviour with as many points on it as most spectra, from which, maybe:
* funny looks
* crossing the road to avoid
* suddenly halting a lively conversation
* name-calling
* telling stories to councils, the Department for Work and Pensions, social services, TV Licensing, the RSPCA, etc.
* excrement on the car / through the door / over the fence
* damage to property, pets, plants, etc.
* putting burning paper through the door
* personal physical attack
* arson (burning paper through the door that 'works')
* murder (where death is not the result of the arson)
That's for the home-life of that person - home, or feeling that one has one, being much of what is left. Since the chances are that, if he or she had a job, an enforced hospital stay led to another spectrum of behaviours, ending in dismissal or resignation. (Home, that is, if an arsonist - or a violent partner - left any home remaining, other than the streets.)
A grim picture? Not an exaggerated one, though, because all of these things do happen, and one thing can lead to another - after all, who is an expert in responding non-provocatively to that sort of attack on who one is and what one has?
No worse considering it than the fact that the mental-health community shudders every time some violent or fatal crime is associated with the perpetrator's mental ill-health, because a backlash is feared. I come back to that phrase:
Who one is and what one has
That is what we want to protect****:
Who one is can so easily and so subtly be under attack, a stealthy attrition that is upon one before one is aware of it, just as is what one has, mentally or, in physical / emotional terms, the little that one calls a home, family, or friends, all of which have a tendency to slip away, if they did not already at whatever breakdown is (the Peer Support Workers call it psychiatric challenge).
Stopping a world continuing to exist where these things happen and are casually - or callously - taken for granted is what combating stigma should work for:
The verbs to traumatize and to stigmatize (both from Greek, so they have a similar ring) are closer than we realize, and using the word 'stigma' - to me - says not nearly as much.
We are stigmatizing people for things that they did not choose to happen. They are not weak, they do not deserve it - if it meant anything to our society any more to say it, we would know that There (but for the grace of God) go I.
This is the significance of talking about one in four people - not that one gets into a four where there already 'a mad person', so that one is magically safe, but that the former slogan of The National Lottery applies: it's not you yet, but how do you know that it won't be?
We must not traumatize people further for what has already left them traumatized - if we were human beings in any real sense, we would stay with them while they seek to tell their stories, weep with them over what has happened already, and help them to heal, and to feel healed, not judged, criticized, abused, spat out and scapegoated.
And, above all, we would burn that stupid slogan out of our hearts, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
End-notes
* Or whatever one's preferred term, as, sadly (in a way), there is no agreement even on that: e.g. mental distress (Mind), mental health difficulty (One in Four magazine), mental illness (NHS), etc., etc.
** Re-made, apparently, unhelpfully faithfully, according to one person who could not see the point of re-enacting the old screenplay.
*** Hesitating to dilate on what is added (or lost) when a visual artist calls every work Untitled, although I will recount how a symbiosis occurred between a painter and a poet:
André Breton, spokesman for the Surrealist movement and a poet and novelist, came to know Arshile Gorky and his works. The two men had a good relationship, such that Breton wrote about and gave rise to titles of many of Gorky's later works
With a good (i.e. apt) title (like The Canterbury Tales), can it be separated from the work, because it is now part of it (and of its meaning)?
**** Even if the dismissive (and damning) ways of some consultant psychiatrists can make the job harder, right at the outset, of that person believing that he or she will not always be like this, always need medication, never get back to work, because it is too stressful.
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)Easter MondayThis is what Marcel Duchamp advocated, when he appeared to have withdrawn from making art in the early decades of last century - see, for example, the chess-sex that both Man Ray and he designed.The heretical idea was that chess only came into existence when two players happened to be somewhere simultaneously and found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a board and playing.However, it was one that came to be discredited when the Surrealists (which usually means their undisputed spokesman in André Breton) - and those who succeeded them - emphasized the place of Desire (where would Salvador Dalí be without it?).Thus: I seek a game, so I summon another to me to play against me* - or we have a standing arrangement to play on such-and-such a day of a week at such-and-such o'clock.Flirting does not enter into it, nor does Arousal**.QEDEnd-notes* And so the expectant, largely deserted cityscapes of Girgio de Chirico. (And yet his Hector and Andromache (1917) is full of so much more passion.)** Thus we have the bare-breasted, dreamy women on the canvases of Paul Delvaux. (But the Le Galet of his compatriot René Magritte, in a Vache period, is far more erotic.)
