My husband doesn’t enjoy peeling oranges. He doesn’t like the little white webs of pith or the way the juice trickles between his fingers and soaks and stains the skin.
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Enter the exhibition and you might feel as if you’ve walked in on a conversation. Sixteen of the thirty-five surviving self-portraits painted in Van Gogh’s final four years, beginning when he was thirty-three, are hung at the same height across two rooms.
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Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcuts radiate a delicate power. It’s there in the light and airy lavenders and blush pinks, and the deep blues and bottle greens that gleam like beetles.
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‘The point is to imagine,’ murmurs Paula, the walleyed protagonist of Maylis de Kerangal’s engaging new novel, Painting Time. She’s talking to Kate, with whom she’s studying the art of trompe-l’œil at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels.
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A woman wheels towards a large blank canvas. In one hand she brandishes a brush, in the other a palette daubed with paint. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her fine silk dress, the lacy white fringe of her chemise curling over the cuffs.
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It was spring and I was there to save my marriage. Not by having a baby, as couples have been known to do, but by confirming that my insides were barren. Rob had told me early on that he always imagined his life without children. That’s fine, I remember laughing, I’m not exactly yearning for motherhood. But then I noticed how I was patting my pockets. My keys, my phone, my wallet. I felt all the time like I’d forgotten something.
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When she was about eight years old, Cindy Sherman began compiling a family photo album. She called it ‘A Cindy Book’, drew a circle around herself if she was pictured alongside others and added a pithy caption below each of the 26 images: ‘That’s me’.
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