For me, the theft of "The Guy in the Striped Room" from the Frick always made it too poignant to visit the museum after lunch. Indeed, it made lunch necessary, to recompose upon a sequence of plates, those elements of nourishment the canvas had framed completely in itself. The failure, then, of the whole restaurant principle comes crashing down upon one, to return to that house on a full stomach.
The general crisis of public gastronomy has not yet figured here. However, it is obvious, that his participation in the cyclical drama of a basket of fruit is what Epicurus had in mind as he lingered for a table at Lucas Carton - which Senderens has self-named, at last, in despair of presenting cliché. Tellingly, he has adopted the very blues for himself that Louis Malle commissioned of Miles Davis, to guide Jeanne Moreau on her erotically anguished march down the Champs-Elysées in Elevator to the Gallows.
The general crisis of public gastronomy has not yet figured here. However, it is obvious, that his participation in the cyclical drama of a basket of fruit is what Epicurus had in mind as he lingered for a table at Lucas Carton - which Senderens has self-named, at last, in despair of presenting cliché. Tellingly, he has adopted the very blues for himself that Louis Malle commissioned of Miles Davis, to guide Jeanne Moreau on her erotically anguished march down the Champs-Elysées in Elevator to the Gallows.
A jest, such as a culinary titan's embrace of the jazz theme of a murderess to project a radical passion, exposes a tension that is real, and famously inherent in exhibitive consumption. In fact Lucas Carton was an indisputable ornament of France. Senderens gutted it in every way, risking travesty to restore its meaning.
For his muse Senderens resorted to iconography even less assailable to the French, indeed to the world, than the name of his restaurant. Whether he fails as Mme Carala did, to salvage love in an assassination of husbandry, is less important than his assertion of artistry in the act.
Still, none of this answers to the tragic gap in the Frick Collection, since the heist of "The Guy in the Striped Room." It only pretends to. Another radical epicure already showed this, in an artistic gesture famously thrusting the life cycle beyond the edge of its shelf, into consuming space. The dialogue between need and nourishment, at least as old as Plato's Symposium, has not lacked depiction for 400 years.
Monochrome for author's comment at The Slab
Music by Miles Davis, "Florence sur les Champs-Elysées"
Colour photograph gift of Tassos Paschalis to Laurent
Jeanne Moreau by window light at midnight by Louis Malle
A Basket of Fruit, ca 1593, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
David Chaloub by window light, morning
Have you seen 'L'Amant' de Louis Malle , with Jeanne Moreau ? A Masterpiece !!!
ReplyDeleteComplete accord with your assessment, and it remains a supreme gesture in the evocation of sexual fulfillment. Moreau assisted Truffaut so well, too, in his evocation of romantic permutation in "Jules et Jim," that as we recall these two directors for their genius in the directing of women, she persists at the center of this judgment - and will always do so with this face she wore in the rain on the Champs-Elysées. Great fortune shined on cinema that night.
ReplyDeleteI am heartened by your notice of this entry.