CHAPTER NINE

Servants’ Quarters, 3

THIS IS THE room where the painter Hutting houses his two servants, Joseph and Ethel.

Joseph Nieto is the chauffeur and odd-job man. He’s a Paraguayan of about forty who used to be a quartermaster in the merchant navy.

Ethel Rogers, a Dutch woman of twenty-six, serves as cook and laundress.

The room is almost entirely filled by a big Empire bed with posts topped by carefully polished brass spheres. Ethel Rogers is getting dressed, half-hidden by a rice-paper screen decorated with floral motifs, over which a cashmere-style shawl has been thrown. Nieto, dressed in an embroidered white shirt and broad-belted black trousers, is stretched out on the bed; in his left hand, held up to his eyes, he has a letter with a diamond-shaped stamp bearing the image of Simón Bolívar, and in his right hand, the middle finger adorned with a heavy signet ring, he holds an ignited cigarette lighter, as if he is preparing to burn the letter he has just received.

Between the bed and the door, there is a small sideboard made of fruit-tree wood, on which a bottle of Black and White whisky stands, identifiable by the two dogs on the label, as well as a plate containing an assortment of salted biscuits.

The room is painted light green. The floor is covered with a carpet of yellow and pink squares. A dressing table, and a single straw chair, with a well-thumbed book on it: French Through Reading. Intermediate Level. Second Year, complete the furnishing.

Above the bed they have pinned a reproduction entitled Arminius and Sigimer: it depicts two grey-cloaked, bull-necked giants with Herculean biceps and red faces sprouting thick moustaches and bushy sideburns.

On the main door a postcard has been fixed with drawing pins: it shows a monumental sculpture by Hutting – Beasts of the Night – adorning the main courtyard of the Prefecture at Pontarlier: entwined lumps of slag dimly suggestive, overall, of some prehistoric animal.

The bottle of whisky and the salted biscuits are a present, or more precisely a tip which Madame Altamont has sent up to them in advance. Hutting has close ties with the Altamonts, and the painter has lent them his servants, who will serve this evening as extras at the annual reception they are holding, in their big flat on the second floor right, beneath Bartlebooth’s. It happens the same way each year, and the Altamonts return the favour for the often lavish parties which the painter gives, every quarter, in his studio.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

BOSSEUR, J.		Les Sculptures de Franz Hutting. Paris, Galerie Maillard, 1965
JACQUET, B.		Hutting: vor Angst hüten. Forum, 1967, 7
HUTTING, F.		Manifeste du Mineral Art. Brussels, Galerie 9 + 3, 1968
HUTTING, F.		Of Stones and Men. Urbana Museum of Fine Arts, 1970
NAHUM, E.		“Towards a planetary consciousness: Grillner, Hagiwara, Hutting”, in S. Gogolak (ed.), An Anthology of Neo-Creative Painting. Los Angeles, Markham and Coolidge, 1974
NAHUM, E.		Haze over Being. An Essay on Franz Hutting’s painting. Paris, XYZ, 1974
XERTIGNY, A. DE		Hutting portraitiste. New Art Review, Montreal, 1975, 3