NIGHT AND DAY

Carpeaux casted that masterpiece in his halcyon days as a platonic homage to a young lady he revered like some inaccessible Goddess rising in his Orient, throning refulgently over his intimate world and airily hieraticising in a languishing attitude of pride and majesty, unveiling the globe to the light, in celebration of the Night.

As a wayward young boy, waif-like grown up in a coal-dusty melancholic northern France jerkwater town, as a contumacious child of some dull proles family, yearning after an idealised and nonetheless tangible love was an aspiration he always bore in mind, an aim wich he at occasion achieved to get close to and inevitably a goal he dramatically missed his entire lifetime.

For as any eager artist infatuated by the vision of his own merits and future status in the establishment, as a youngling socially accustomed to afflicting componction or for that matter as any nubile young man he was indecisive, awkward and self-destructive. By family and social bigotry hen-pecked he would only be hemmed in the day a noble-minded person with pertinent credentials would come along with emotions, flame and the bequest for him to settle down in society's formal frames.

He grew hindered in the very ability to forge and to develop a lasting relationship. There he comes, dwarfed ephebe sneaking amatorily around the globe, overpowered by his love, deferently agog, glancing at his cleaving passion, seemingly invisible to her, unnoticed. Is she trying to stave off remembrances of the night, is she smiling to herself with condescension at a jilted admirer, is she already prepared to stalk away spindling her daydreams ?

Or is she modestly shying away from a feeble-minded harrying character, annealing and adamantly determined to jettison a desultory, immature tormenter ?

Farewell, so long young Carpeaux, and remember now the soulless artist, defering the dull tryst with the Médicis, procrastinating as if heading for his own exequis.

At that time though, he was still sincere, gifted, albeit longing for accreditation, ripening for compromission, acquiescence and decadence.

Peter E. HEALER, San Francisco, 1969

 

 

 

 

 

 

The WORKS, OPUS and OPERA

Official and family apologists have been eager at highlighting some parts of Carpeaux's life at the detriment of some other aspects of his cross-bearing journey. By the same token they have been dismissing or tried to obliterate some of his greatest plastic achievements at the very time they magnified some later official advertised works : Close-up at some inarticulated monkey-shaped anticking fisherman or at the dance group leading figure's botched anatomy and petrified geometric grin !

You may imagine that those later dayly-bread oriented creations were already prepaid for, like grafted friends' committed productions...

And you may stop wonder why Paris, familiar with scandals, antiques and Académies, burst out derisive, girding, vilifying at the Works, at the Opéra...

Peter E. HEALER , San Francisco, 1969