Bruce Chatwin

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Bruce Chatwin


(Picture: flickr.com)

How far must a man travel to escape art? Or, with Bruce Chatwin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chatwin), traveller, writer, ex-Sotheby’s expert on Antiquities and Impressionist Art, and writing in 1986 to the Australian writer Murray Bail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bail): »Can we ever escape ›Art‹?«.

Can we ever escape ›Art‹…? (picture: DS)

Did Bruce Chatwin only travel to escape the art world, the art game, or in brief: to escape ›Art‹ as such?
This might be a little bit oversimplifying, but Chatwin himself, as a narrator, did at the least link the travelling and the art: »›You’ve been looking too closely at pictures,‹ he [the eye specialist] said. ›Why don’t you swap them for some long horizons?‹«
This passage from The Songlines might also be a good example for Chatwin’s style, that, if I had to bring it to a formula, I would describe as ›Eye and Speed‹. Which means that Chatwin loved to take these giant steps while narrating, like saying ›they met in Italy, married in Paris, and it was in Australia where I met them‹.
And eye, if understood as having attentiveness for people, landscape, things and details, might speak for itself. Or, again with Chatwin, and with the chatwinesque speed-style that can easily blind, in its sheer brilliancy: »›Ha!‹ said the old gentleman [to Sotheby’s expert Bruce Chatwin]. ›I see you have The Eye. I too have The Eye. We shall be friends.‹«

It is a Madonna by »Piero« that Chatwin is reminded of while observing a most practical, energetic and helpful Australian woman (which is why we have chosen to show a Piero della Francesca Madonna above).
It is Botticelli’s Venus that made, apparently, a most deep impression on him in his youth.
And it is a Paolo Veronese landscape that Chatwin, while being in an Oxford hospital in 1986, hallucinated. At least this is what he did write to Australian writer Murray Bail, raising the question, in the same breath, if we can ›ever escape art‹.

»I was hallucinating like mad and was convinced that the view from my window – a car park, a wall and the tops of some trees – were an enormous painting by Paolo Veronese. Can we ever escape ›Art‹?«

And if we take the Chatwin of this letter by the word, it is not about escaping the art game, nor the art world. This passage refers (rhetorically) to an (impossible) escape on a most basic level, and one may paraphrase the question in saying: Can we ever escape from living in the experiences that we have made in encountering art? Or do we, at a hospital, for example, when living through a feverish dream, experience that these experiences come back all the more intensely, for us to realize that we live in them and through them?
A car park, a wall, and the tops of some trees: A landscape by Veronese (see also: http://www.seybold.ch/Dietrich/TheProfessorAndHisOneStudent). A practical nurse, a Madonna by Piero. A traveller who travels, possibly, not to escape, but to find the things once seen? Because it’s the things that are actually able to escape us, and because only in travelling or after having travelled one might find them again?

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