Chapter 5
Emma
“Do you ever think about what makes a painting famous, Emma?”
When I was accepted to the école des Beaux-Arts two years ago, I received a scholarship sponsored by an anonymous donor who had pledged to support three women who created or studied art.
My roommates and I were the first to receive it.
Colette and Lucie have become like family to me, the women I would do absolutely anything for.
All our tuition was covered. Room and board was up to us.
The program was supposed to last for three years, but after year two, about six months ago, the funding was abruptly cut off with no explanation, and the three of us were left to cobble together thousands or leave the program unfinished.
Colette and Lucie were in the same boat as I was.
We’d all made sacrifices to be there. We were all broke and carrying our own baggage, but we struggled together and were stronger for it.
Early on we had managed to find ourselves an apartment that was cheap but certainly not free. We all stitched together various jobs over the past couple of years in cafés and bars, different kinds of service work. I currently clean about five homes a week.
There are two months until the new semester begins, and I don’t have nearly enough to be allowed to start classes.
I’m so desperate for cash I’ve even looked around Stella’s apartment for objects to pawn.
There are many things I’m sure she won’t miss, but I also keep remembering what Matthew said about Stella owning nothing in this apartment. How long will any of this be hers?
Stella asks me her question again since I’m so distracted.
“Do you ever think about what makes paintings famous, dear?”
Yes, I want to shout. I think about it constantly.
I think about it every time I look at a Rothko that makes absolutely no sense to me, or when some dildo of a dude from my art class is chosen for an exhibition with his reimaginings of those very same Rothkos.
I think about it each time my friends and I are overlooked for similar exhibitions and told our work is kitschy or derivative.
I think about it when I gaze at The Origin of the World, a painting I love in the Orsay, but also resent because I know that Gustave Courbet was famous not only for his art but for his confidence and his strong temperament, his bold physical presence.
Some might even say for his beard. Critics loved his distinct pointed beard and they ignored similar paintings and nudes by women created at the same time because those women didn’t have commanding facial hair.
I know that many other male artists achieved fame and success because they married well.
They chose wives with rich fathers and excellent connections.
But I also know plenty of them, Vincent van Gogh included, died penniless and relatively unknown and only became famous years later because a very rich collector chose to fancy them and paid an extraordinary amount of money for their work.
“I’d like to think that paintings become famous because people love them,” I say, which is naive but not untrue. It’s what I want to believe.
Stella snorts like a wild boar. “Wouldn’t that be so lovely.
If only, my dear. For every famous piece of art and every ‘great’ artist there is someone behind the scenes pulling all the strings, supporting all the effort.
A dealer, a wife, a celebrity champion. No one does this alone and no painting exists in a vacuum. Someone is always working for it.”
“One of my favorite paintings cost me three francs,” I say with pride. “I found it at the flea market buried beneath a bunch of old maps and I bargained the guy down from ten.”
“Which market, Les Puces?”
“Yeah. The Fleas.” It’s the nickname for the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen, the largest antiques, collectibles, and junk market in Europe.
Our apartment overlooks the seventy-five thousand square feet of tents and stalls selling everything from Limoges china to Victorian baby clothes, AA batteries and toilet paper to vintage Hermès scarves and Louis XIV chandeliers.
There are necessities and junk and treasures and the lines between the three are often blurry.
After a day in Les Puces, I walk away convinced I’ll never need to buy anything new ever again.
I wander through it almost every day that it’s open, and even though I have no money to spare, certain things always catch my eye.
My roommate Colette taught me the French verb for this: chiner.
It is quintessentially Parisian, the concept of browsing without intention, aimlessly perusing and soaking in the journey instead of the destination.
Sifting through all the old stuff soothes my nerves when I’m spiraling about the future or wondering if I can pay for another year of art school and whether that’s even worth it.
When I curse myself for being such a wretched daughter and leaving my mother on her own even though taking care of her was slowly killing me.
Riffling through all the things that someone discarded, that someone decided were no longer worthy, I find I can relate to them all.
“I love that you’ve been. I worry your generation only shops at Monoprix.” I don’t tell her that even Monoprix, the Kmart of France, is too expensive for me.
I’m about to tell her how close I live to the market, just beyond the boulevard périphérique, how I can see and smell it from my bedroom.
Colette sells things when she can get a stall for a good price.
Since we moved into our place we’ve taken to calling our little crew of three, our small chosen family, the Fleas.
It came about after we were deep into some cheap wine we’d pilfered from a gallery opening in the Marais.
“We’re just like the fleas on the back of a dog.
We’re survivors.” Lucie had raised her chipped crystal goblet in the air.
“They can all look down on us, but we will always find a way.” Everything in my body swelled with love for her and Colette.
I adored them from the moment I met them, when they took me under their own broken wings when I first arrived in Paris.
Colette, born and raised in the South of France, is the more nurturing of the two.
She’s a human heartbeat outside of a body.
She always assumed she wouldn’t have a career, that she would remain in the countryside raising babies, married to the man she began dating at fourteen even though she has an encyclopedic memory for art history and has always longed to work in a grand museum or auction house as a forensic art analyst and appraiser.
Receiving the scholarship to the école des Beaux-Arts was her ticket out of her abusive marriage and a gateway to her dreams. Lucie, a Turkish expat, raised between Paris and Istanbul, is the bolder and brasher of us, but once you enter her inner circle you realize she would slice off her index finger for you.
I cherish my adopted neighborhood just as much as I do my friends.
It’s alive in a different way than central Paris and reminds me the way places like Montmartre must have been when the Impressionists started painting there, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city for people striving to make a better life for themselves.
In the market of Les Puces all the classes collide.
Some people do their daily shopping from the sidewalks outside the stalls, buying cooking oil, toilet paper, and expired food, shampoo, and sneakers too worn to even be sold in the charity shops.
In the center are fine art galleries negotiating the sale of paintings for as much as seven figures.
“I bought my favorite fur coat there for two francs in 1977,” Stella says, currently propped up on a couple of pillows in her bed while I scrub down the massive windows.
“Two francs?”
“Fur was going out of fashion, even here.”
By the seventies Stella was already married to Maxwell Swanson and certainly didn’t need to skimp on a two-franc flea market fur, but I like her more for it.
“Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere. I think it may be in Capri.” One of their many homes.
I wonder if Stella is still allowed to visit any of them, if she was allowed to pack up her belongings from their various abodes before she was ostensibly exiled.
Even if Stella’s family succeeds in stripping away everything she thought she shared with her husband, it will take another lifetime for them just to empty out all her closets.
“You can find wonderful paintings and sketches there,” I tell her.
“Oh yes.” Stella claps her hands in delight. “You can find some real treasures. I once discovered a Suzanne Valadon sketch buried beneath a bunch of old train schedules and maps. Do you know her?”
I’ve seen Valadon’s La Chambre bleue in the Pompidou museum.
I love it. The painting is of a woman lounging on a fainting couch, the sort on which you’d usually find a nude, but this woman is fully dressed in green striped pajama pants, smoking an ungainly cigarette next to a pile of books you can tell she is eager to read if only she had more time.
She’s every woman I’ve ever known. Her pose evokes the traditional odalisque, but Valadon subverts this trope by presenting a fully clothed, independent woman who occupies space confidently rather than presenting herself for a man.
“I do. In fact, there’s a Valadon exhibition happening right now at the Pompidou that I have been dying to see.”
“Oh, how wonderful. I bet they have some of ours…” She stammers. “Of theirs. The Swansons own many of the originals.”
“Should we go visit?” I ask, suddenly wanting to get Stella out of this beautiful yet unsettling apartment.
“I would enjoy that one of these days.”
“It’s Thursday. The museum is open late tonight,” I say. “Let’s go.”
“Right now?”