Fourteen

Black and white posters of a man’s silhouette popped up overnight all over Paris with the words WHO IS THIS MAN? in bold underneath. Sipping his café noisette in the first class compartment of the train for Nice, the small, neat, grey-haired man chuckled to himself as he read the account of the interview in Le Devoir with the headline ART ATTACKER SPEAKS. That’s the best they could do, he thought while still thoroughly enjoying the grainy photo taken from a television screen that showed his noble features to excellent advantage. He tugged at his goatee and checked his reflection in the train window.

The previous night’s TV special dominated both the airwaves and the city’s conversation in the hours that followed. Star TV journalist Louise Lafontaine had been contacted secretly and offered an exclusive interview with the man behind the “art attacks” in exchange for a guarantee of his safety and anonymity. The drama of hearing the culprit’s voice altered electronically and seeing his profile in silhouette added to the public’s feverish obsession with the mystery. The outrage of the French public led to a chorus of voices demanding that Louise reveal her sources or be arrested herself. She claimed that her only contact was a very old, bearded man with a cane who arranged for the art attacker to arrive at the network by a back alley entrance at a precise time. Even the station employees saw only what the public saw, a silhouette, a shape of a face without features.

“Please tell us, Monsieur Réplique, as you have chosen to be called, what the purpose of these art attacks is.”

Louise had gone all-out preparing for the biggest interview of her young career. Her nails glistened in a blushing rose, matched by her dewy lipstick and a dash of rouge. The tidal wave of auburn hair, her signature, was swept up, defying gravity and framed by dramatic backlighting. This was her moment.

“Very simply, Louise,” he began in a kindly tone. “The art that we have all come to know and love and identify ourselves by has come, over time, to imprison our senses. We no longer see, we expect. We do not experience, we only reassure ourselves of our good taste. Our love of art is now at the level of our affection for a crisp white wine or a buttery croissant eaten on the way to work. As an aside, may I say that I do appreciate the odd sticky croissant amande,” he chortled amiably.

“Oui, of course,” Louise nodded agreeably, “and my day is quite incomplete without a petit pain au chocolat with my café américain.” Here they seemed to be sharing a private joke as the nation watched, stupefied. “But Monsieur Réplique, even if we have become sedated by familiarity, does this work not belong to the people of France, and by extension, the world? What do you say to those who travel halfway around the world to lay eyes, just once perhaps, on a beloved Van Gogh, da Vinci, or Magritte?”

He could be heard sighing, as if having to explain something for the hundredth time to a child. “My dear Louise,” he said patronizingly, “and may I direct my comments to those very people you refer to; have you ever stood in front of a Matisse, a Léger, or a Rembrandt, and just listened to the observations and comments of your fellow art lovers? Because I have, for many hours at a time, and frankly, these ardent admirers of creative genius and timeless beauty make me sick.”

His tone turned dark as Louise seemed to sit up straighter, knowing she was getting to the real heart of the interview. The camera did a slow zoom in on the goateed silhouette. Snarkiness took over his voice.

“I love the colour of his hat, Bob. Couldn’t he get a hotter chick than that to pose for him, Chip? No idea what kind of flower that is, do you know, Marge? When does the restaurant open?”

He stopped, and silence took over. You could almost hear Louise thinking of how to reply. “Sound familiar, Louise?”

She hesitated. “Well, I suppose, but surely there are some who ...”

“Ah oui,” he interjected, tugging at his little beard like a beatnik Santa, “there are the art history majors who analyze the colour of the uniform of the twenty-second soldier from the left in the third row behind Napoleon to see if it suggests his childhood love of fire engines growing up in Corsica.” His voice oozed disdain. “Let me be clear,” he said condescendingly. “I am not a snob like the people who run our major art institutions,” his voice curdled, “like the Louvre. If the works lived and breathed among us, I believe the people would appreciate it as their creators intended.”

Louise came right back at him. “But even considering all this, do you, one man, have a right to alter the work of the masters to make your point?”

The French public held its breath, loving her challenging tone. The defiant flip of the auburn wave helped Louise make her point. But the little man came roaring back.

“I stand for those masters!” he thundered. “For they can no longer be heard. Their work should speak for them, but what it says is lost in the clamour of idiots with cell phones, mall dwellers, and café intellectuals alike with their collections of limited edition teddy bears, their trays of hundreds of shades of nail polish, and their smug little book clubs where no one gets past page thirty-five!”

Louise subtly placed her hands in her lap and looked at the camera. “We’ll be right back after these messages.”

A break that included a gauzy ad for skin cream that would take decades off your face was followed by a commercial for a new mini “smarter than smart” car that could fit into a space the size of a fire hydrant, and a promo for a hot new daytime soap opera that revealed the petty jealousies and secret loves of a family-run cheese factory in Toulouse.

After the break, it was a flustered Louise who appeared alone on TV screens all over France. “I ... uh ... we ... excuse me, I mean there’s been a last minute change ... a rather, uh ... unexpected programming, uh ... turn of events.” The hiss of urgent voices could be heard in the background. “Monsieur Réplique, as he wished to be known, not his real name of course, disappeared from our studios during the break. I don’t think he will return, since he left something behind. Perhaps he felt he had said all he needed, or maybe he feared for his safety, given the extremely controversial nature of his actions.”

Someone off-camera handed Louise a black envelope with ornate silver script that read, To be revealed only by Mlle Lafontaine to the people of France. As she opened the envelope, Louise said, “I want you to know that we are seeing this for the first time and the network cannot be held responsible for its contents or the actions of its author.” She seemed to be reading from a teleprompter. “It’s called ‘An Artifesto: Five principles by which we may learn to see again.’”

“1. Art must be ‘with the people.’ It cannot be the exclusive domain of airless mausoleums masquerading as museums. Witness the location of a beautiful Léger mural in the courtyard, or the Calder mobile poolside at La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence.

“2. Art must be ‘about the people.’ Is the beauty of a peasant woman kneading bread or the way a blanket drying on the line plays with the wind not as exquisite as so-called fine art?

“3. Art must be ‘for the people.’ Is the pompous prime minister who poses and pays for art the one for whom the greats should toil in order to afford their canvases and paint? Let the artist receive that fat government cheque each month.

“4. Art must be ‘by the people.’ Why not celebrate the creations of the seamstress, the florist, the weaver whose works beautify life very day?

“5. Art must be ‘of the people.’ Do we need another portrait of a pasty, preening, overfed secretary of state? Let us see the milkmaid, the delivery boy, the café waitress at work.”

“These must be met or the so-called masterpieces will disappear forever!

Sincerely,

René Réplique”

Louise looked up from reading the “Artifesto” and simply stared at the camera.

A strange thing happened. It started with one letter to the editor of a small weekly paper in Brittany, in the north of France, and slowly gathered momentum. Some, not all of course, of what the art attacker said made sense to people. They were tired of not being able to afford access to the great works. Or if they did visit, fighting through a throng of shorts and sneakers-wearing loudmouths, arguing over whether Venus de Milo lost her arm in a tragic fencing accident or was born that way. The idea of art displayed in public appealed to a rebellious side of the French populace. One by one, major art institutions began an “art à la maison” movement with Monet and Caillebotte rubbing shoulders with pop star posters and calendars from the local boulangerie. Starting with the smaller museums, like the Jeu de Palme in Paris, the art of the people was given a viewing on Sundays. Even the tradition-bound Louvre, with Blaise Roquefort gagging and grinding his teeth all the way, agreed to an exhibition of finger painting by a particularly talented group of five-year-olds from a nearby school. The mysterious art attacker was triumphant.