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拍品专文
In 1975, when we were hanging Franciszka’s exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, a young helper holding onto her painting entitled Piéton Apocalypse expressed a surprise. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘that an artist in her sixties would paint something like this—it looks more like the work of a thirty-year-old.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘It’s the use of paint, like putty and an image that could be read in several different ways with the body made up of faces,’ he said. Yes, of course, Franciszka’s paintings are full of intermingling faces, often several in the same space. Sometimes faces are the network spinning through an entire canvas, and in this painting some faces are like shadows discernible in the background. What the young man said is true, it is ‘a young painting.’
This wasn’t the only time I know of when someone attempted to read something into this painting. In 1996 a parcel arrived containing a large hard-backed volume, The 20th Century Art Book published by Phaidon. I was very happy to see that this painting was reproduced in full colour. It was on page number 457 in the alphabetical list of artists’ surnames. But the title of Piéton Apocalypse was changed. It was given as Pietà Apocalypse. Someone must have assumed that Piéton, a modest ‘pedestrian’, that could also mean uneventful or boring, was a mistake. Perhaps it seemed too simple and lacking in gravity for it to be associated with the word ‘apocalypse’. The text in the book went on to explain: ‘The religious connotation of the title gives the work a spiritual dimension’. Should this changed title have made us ponder on the image of Mary and the dead Christ? Or, was it simply that nobody noticed that the title was in French?
Which brings me to the subject on Franciszka’s titles. They are not simple. Giving titles to paintings wasn’t easy for her, and we can’t be sure at which point a title was chosen. Perhaps this happened only when the painting was finished or had been hanging on the wall of the studio for some time.
Franciszka didn’t explain her paintings, and the titles didn’t really explain them either. When asked: ‘What is this painting about?’ she would say: ‘Go, and have a look!’, and was once even heard to exclaim confrontationally: ‘Are you blind?’ There were titles that were useful. Some were descriptive; others, like ‘Composition’, were just uncommitted, then there were the puzzling ones like Piéton Apocalypse. Titles taken from quotations presented a mood, a thought, a text recalled, or read at the time. There were titles borrowed from the writings by Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Apollinaire, Ferlinghetti. The words provided a sort of bridge for the viewer. They didn’t, and couldn’t, explain very much, but created a mood with which one could look at the canvas.
But of course, we always knew that when it comes to art, titles and explanations, even without misinterpretation, play a relatively modest role.
—Jasia Reichardt
This wasn’t the only time I know of when someone attempted to read something into this painting. In 1996 a parcel arrived containing a large hard-backed volume, The 20th Century Art Book published by Phaidon. I was very happy to see that this painting was reproduced in full colour. It was on page number 457 in the alphabetical list of artists’ surnames. But the title of Piéton Apocalypse was changed. It was given as Pietà Apocalypse. Someone must have assumed that Piéton, a modest ‘pedestrian’, that could also mean uneventful or boring, was a mistake. Perhaps it seemed too simple and lacking in gravity for it to be associated with the word ‘apocalypse’. The text in the book went on to explain: ‘The religious connotation of the title gives the work a spiritual dimension’. Should this changed title have made us ponder on the image of Mary and the dead Christ? Or, was it simply that nobody noticed that the title was in French?
Which brings me to the subject on Franciszka’s titles. They are not simple. Giving titles to paintings wasn’t easy for her, and we can’t be sure at which point a title was chosen. Perhaps this happened only when the painting was finished or had been hanging on the wall of the studio for some time.
Franciszka didn’t explain her paintings, and the titles didn’t really explain them either. When asked: ‘What is this painting about?’ she would say: ‘Go, and have a look!’, and was once even heard to exclaim confrontationally: ‘Are you blind?’ There were titles that were useful. Some were descriptive; others, like ‘Composition’, were just uncommitted, then there were the puzzling ones like Piéton Apocalypse. Titles taken from quotations presented a mood, a thought, a text recalled, or read at the time. There were titles borrowed from the writings by Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Apollinaire, Ferlinghetti. The words provided a sort of bridge for the viewer. They didn’t, and couldn’t, explain very much, but created a mood with which one could look at the canvas.
But of course, we always knew that when it comes to art, titles and explanations, even without misinterpretation, play a relatively modest role.
—Jasia Reichardt