Walking with Genevieve Asse

I've recently made a friend who has been launching me on a precipitate tour of all manner of French writers and artists, particularly those who hail from this region.

While this is bringing home to me my own ignorance in a salutory fashion, it is, on the whole, more of a pleasure than a penance.

'You've not heard of Genevieve Asse?'  I get the quizzical and somewhat disbelieving cocked eyebrow, 'she's really very well-known...' followed by the sigh which only kindness and detachment prevents from being despairing of me.

'That may be so,' I shrug '' but...I really should take notes when you talk to me!'

But I remembered about Genevieve Asse, and glory be to the internet, I went home and looked her up.  She's 87 now, still looking magnificent, at least in all the photos I saw, and when she was younger than Maxime she was driving a wartime ambulance, and when she was the age of his big sister Anais she was present at the evacuation of a concentration camp.  She was born on the Rhuys peninsular, where we went this year, and lives on the Ile de Moines, in the Gulf of Morbihan.

I learned of her quest for blue, of how her surfaces, as she expresses it, change like the ocean, and her subjects are space and light.  This appeals.

I spent a nearly lightless snowy early afternoon looking at her work on-line, and though that provides a taster, and the photographs of it in exhibition space give more of an impression of how it appears, I wished I could stand in front of it for real.  There was an exhibition of her paintings in Rennes earlier this year, but I didn't know about her then.

Then I looked up, and the snow was melting a little and the cloud lifting, and there was a strange, partially illumined mist outside.  Why stare at a screen and hanker for galleries? 

Here were blue near-monochromes, bisecting lines, and space and light, and liquid changing surfaces. ( I've only done the minimum of editing of these.)

But it is not either/or.  The kind of romantic puritanism that says that the works of the human hand, art or making of any kind, must always be inferior to what nature can show us, that we should always be seeking some source or origin is missing the mark.  I looked at the space and the light with freshened eyes, having seen it, in some measure, through hers.  Art, great or small, does that, it takes the raw matter of the world, transforms it, but intensifies rather than dilutes it, so that we then turn back to it and see it more truly as itself.

We agreed, my friend and I, that abstract art is an unsatisfactory term; all art is abstract, it takes elements from the world and makes something else of them; sometimes more immediately recognisable than others.  I'm not sure though, that I would have fully appreciated this at an earlier time.

It is never too late to learn, to be educated, in the proper sense, led out.  I am easy on myself for what I don't know, and trust that it is the right moment for me to learn, and I am grateful for the people I find who help me do so. I hope it always will be so.  

~~~

[ There's no one site I could really link to on Genevieve Asse, though there is plenty about, much of it in French.  The images I've reproduced are those which a Google image search yields easily, mostly from exhibition previews and such like, so I've lifted them as I've found them, and reproduced them small which I hope is acceptable).