Winckler, 2
TO BEGIN WITH, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of gō. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up – which the English word puzzle indicates so well – not only loses its raison d’être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.
The role of the puzzle-maker is hard to define. In most cases – and in particular in all cardboard jigsaws – the puzzles are machine-made, and the lines of cutting are entirely arbitrary: a blanking die, set up once and for all, cuts the sheets of cardboard along identical lines every time. But such jigsaws are eschewed by the true puzzle-lover, not just because they are made of cardboard instead of wood, nor because the solutions are printed on the boxes they come in, but because this type of cut destroys the specific nature of jigsaw puzzles. Contrary to a widely and firmly held belief, it does not actually matter whether the initial image is easy (or something taken to be easy – a genre scene in the style of Vermeer, for example, or a colour photograph of an Austrian castle) or difficult (a Jackson Pollock, a Pissarro, or the poor paradox of a blank puzzle). It’s not the subject of the picture, or the painter’s technique, which makes a puzzle more or less difficult, but the greater or lesser subtlety of the way it has been cut; and an arbitrary cutting pattern will necessarily produce an arbitrary degree of difficulty, ranging from the extreme of easiness – for edge pieces, patches of light, well-defined objects, lines, transitions – to the tiresome awkwardness of all the other pieces (cloudless skies, sand, meadow, ploughed land, shaded areas, etc.).
Pieces in puzzles of this kind come in classes of which the best-known are
the little chaps
the double crosses 
and once the edges have been put together, the detail pieces put in place – the very light, almost whitish yellow fringe on the carpet on the table holding a lectern with an open book, the rich edging of the mirror, the lute, the woman’s red dress – and the bulk of the background pieces parcelled out according to their shade of grey, brown, white, or sky blue, then solving the puzzle consists simply of trying all the plausible combinations one by one.
The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker undertakes to ask himself all the questions the player will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery, and subterfuge. All the elements occurring in the image to be reassembled – this armchair covered in gold brocade, that three-pointed black hat with its rather ruined black plume, or that silver-braided bright yellow livery – serve by design as points of departure for trails that lead to false information. The organised, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless elements containing little information or signifying power, but also into falsified elements, carrying false information; two fragments of cornice made to fit each other perfectly when they belong in fact to two quite separate sections of the ceiling, the belt buckle of a uniform which turns out in extremis to be a metal clasp holding the chandelier, several almost identically cut pieces belonging, for one part, to a dwarf orange tree placed on a mantelpiece and, for the other part, to its scarcely attenuated reflection in a mirror, are classic examples of the types of traps puzzle-lovers come across.
From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
To find his puzzle-maker, Bartlebooth put advertisements in Le Jouet Français and in Toy Trader, asking applicants to submit a sample, fourteen centimetres by nine, cut into two hundred pieces. He got twelve responses; most were obvious and unappealing, of the Meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold kind, or an Evening in an English Cottage in all its purportedly authentic detail: an aged Lady So-and-So in a black silk dress with a hexagonal quartz brooch, a butler bringing coffee on a tray, Regency furniture and the portrait of the ancestor (a gentleman with short side whiskers, wearing a red jacket of the period of the last horse-drawn stagecoaches, dressed in white jodhpurs, top boots, and a grey top hat, holding a switch in his hand), a patchwork rug over the hearth, issues of The Times laid out on the small table by the wall, a large Chinese carpet with a sky-blue ground, a retired general (recognisable as such by his cropped grey hair, his short white moustache, his ruddy skin, and his row of decorations) beside the window, looking at the barometer with a supercilious air, a young man standing at the fireplace engrossed in Punch, etc. Another design, which simply showed a magnificent peacock in his pride, Bartlebooth liked enough to summon its inventor – a Russian émigré prince living rather poorly at Le Raincy – but he looked too old for Bartlebooth’s plans.
Gaspard Winckler’s puzzle matched exactly what Bartlebooth had wanted. Winckler had made it from an image in the style of popular Epinal prints, signed with the initials M.W. and entitled The Last Expedition in Search of Franklin. For the first few hours of his attempt to solve it, Bartlebooth believed that it consisted only of variations on white; in fact, the main body of the picture showed a ship, the Fox, trapped in pack ice: standing by the ice-covered tiller, swaddled in light-grey furs from which their deathly pale faces could barely be distinguished, two men, Captain M’Clintoch, leader of the expedition, and his Inupik interpreter, Carl Petersen, point towards a group of Eskimos emerging from a swirling fog covering the whole horizon, and coming towards them on dog-drawn sledges; in the four corners of the picture, four insets showed, respectively: the death of Sir John Franklin, succumbing to exhaustion in the arms of his two surgeons, Peddie and Stanley, on 11 June 1847; the expedition’s two ships, the Erebus, under Fitz-James, and the Terror, captained by Crozier; and the discovery by Lieutenant Hobson, the Fox’s first mate, on 6 May 1859, on King William Island, of the cairn containing the last message left by the one hundred and five survivors on 25 April 1848 before they abandoned their ships crushed by the pack ice and attempted to get back to Hudson’s Bay by sledge or on foot.
Gaspard Winckler had just arrived in Paris at that time. He was barely twenty-two. Nothing has ever leaked out about the contract he made with Bartlebooth, but a few months later he and his wife Marguerite moved into Rue Simon-Crubellier. She was a miniaturist: it was she who had painted the gouache Winckler had used for his trial puzzle.
For nearly two years Winckler had almost nothing to do apart from equipping his workroom (he had the door padded and the walls lined with cork), ordering his instruments, preparing his materials, carrying out trials. Then, in the last days of 1934, Bartlebooth and Smautf set off, and three weeks later Winckler received the first watercolour from Spain. Thenceforth they followed without interruption for twenty years at a rhythm of two per month. None was ever lost, even at the height of the war, when sometimes a second secretary at the Swedish Embassy would bring them round himself.
On the first day Winckler would place the watercolour on an easel near the window and would look at it without touching it. On the second day, he would glue it to a backing board (poplar plywood) of slightly larger dimensions. He used a special glue, of a rather pretty blue hue, which he made up himself, and he would insert between the Whatman art paper and the wood a blank sheet of fine paper intended to make the later reseparation of the reconstituted watercolour from the plywood easier, and which would serve as a border to the future puzzle. Then he coated the whole surface with a protective glaze which he put on with a wide flat brush shaped like a fishtail. Then for three or four days he would study the watercolour under a magnifying glass, or, putting it back on the easel, he would sit opposite it for hours on end, getting up now and again to go and examine a detail more closely, or padding around it like a panther in its cage.
The first week would be spent uniquely in such anxious and minute observation. Then everything began to happen very quickly: Winckler would put an extremely thin piece of tracing paper on the watercolour and would draw the puzzle’s cutting lines in one sweep of the hand. The rest was only a technical business, a slow and dainty procedure demanding scrupulous care and craft but requiring no further inventiveness. From the tracing paper, the craftsman would make a kind of mould – prefiguring the open-work grid Morellet would use twenty years later to reconstitute the watercolour – which allowed him to control efficiently the movement of his swannecked jigsaw. Filing each piece with glasspaper, then with chamois leather, and a few final fiddlesome tasks filled the last days of each fortnight. The puzzle would be stored in one of Madame Hourcade’s black boxes with their grey ribbons; a rectangular label, showing the time and place of the watercolour’s painting
FORT-DAUPHIN (MADAGASCAR) 12 JUNE 1940
or
PORT SAID (EGYPT) 31 DECEMBER 1953
was glued inside, beneath the lid, and the box, numbered and sealed, would go off to join the other puzzles in a safe-deposit box at the Société Générale; the next day or shortly thereafter another watercolour would arrive in the post.
Gaspard Winckler did not like to be watched working. Marguerite never went into his workshop, where he could shut himself off for days on end, and when Valène came to see him the craftsman always found a pretext for stopping and hiding his work. He never said, “You are disturbing me”, but rather something along the lines of “Ah, how convenient you came, I was just going to stop”, or he would begin to do the housework, opening the window to air the room, dusting his bench with a linen cloth, or emptying his ashtray, a huge pearl-oyster shell in which apple cores were piled high amongst the long stubs of yellow-paper Gitane cigarettes which he never relit.
