The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford
By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Charles Willeford, author of The Burnt Orange Heresy (published in 1971) asks a great deal of his readers. We must walk, with the protagonist, the thin line between Dada and Surrealism. This line stretches over an abyss.
The following quote from Greek Sophist and rhetorician Gorgias of Leontini appears before the title page:
"Nothing exists.
If anything exists, it is incomprehensible.
If anything was comprehensible,
It would be incommunicable."
Yet, there is no scope for misunderstanding intent in this darkly ironic novel. Intent exists in the abyss and is comprehensible and a communicable disease.
James Figueras, with a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and misunderstood author of Art and the Preschool Child, makes a modest living as a columnist for Fine Arts: The Americas and a freelance writer for other art magazines. Being only thirty-two, he is on the young side to be an expert on modern art. He lives in “a rent-controlled Village pad” in New York. However, we never see him there. Willeford sows and reaps the plot in his home patch. The events of the novel mostly take place over two days in late April in Palm Beach, Florida and in and around Valdosta, Georgia.
While Figueras is in Palm Beach to cover an art season, he meets Berenice Hollis who is on vacation to recover from a minor surgery. She works as a High School English teacher in Duluth, Minnesota. Figueras regrets asking her to move in because now she will not leave although he tells her to go. He finds it difficult to write in the tiny apartment with her “staring lovingly at his (my) back”.
Chicago-based art collector Joseph Cassidy approaches Figueras with a deal. Figueras does not consider refusing. If he pulled off the steal, he would be doing posterity a favor, Figueras rationalizes to Berenice later. It is an opportunity to talk to and look at unseen works of the Grand Old Man of Modern Art, Frenchman Jacques Debierue, who is secretly residing off State Road Seven, near Boynton Beach.
Figueras, a yellow haired and blue-eyed Puerto Rican who moved to mainland USA when he was twelve years old and apparently never publicly spoke Spanish again, is as confused as he is opinionated. He loves Berenice and he cannot stand her. He understands modern art and makes a living explaining it but proves with pen and paintbrush that it is incomprehensible. He is a fly caught in his own web of sophistry, in the end giving up even the “intellectual conscience” he claimed to have.
A film based on the book was released in 2019. It starred Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki as Figueras and Berenice, Donald Sutherland as the artist and Mick Jagger as Cassidy. Giuseppe Capotondi directed the film. Fifty years after Willeford’s book was published, the film makers considered the material relevant, and so it is. Scott B. Smith wrote the film version, in which the action takes place in 2019 out of Milan, and the artist (whose name is changed to Jerome Debney) lives in a secluded part of the grounds of Cassidy’s vacation villa overlooking Lake Como. The film and the book are standalone works and there is no point in comparing them. It is interesting, instead, to note how easily Figueras and Cassidy fit into our times, and the way dangerous rhetoric and criminal intent have become run-of-the-mill. Yet personal choice has remained possible. The artist, luminous, humorous, perspicacious, has chosen to live in a certain way through eighty odd years, whether up to 1969 or 2019. He is “No. One.” Neither the book nor the film doubts that. Even Figueras gets the innocence.
Willeford’s entertaining and horrifying novel races to a surprising end. Figueras seems to be developing a new pedantic interest: the "emotional” conscience. He is bored. Having measured column inches in the International Encyclopedia of the Fine Arts, (eighteen months or so after the main events of the novel) he knows he has achieved the unthinkable. His article on Debierue has been allotted more space than those on Goya, El Greco, Piranesi, and Michelangelo.
I am reminded of Goya expert Prof. Francisco Montiel (played by Louis de Funès) in the 1959 Italian comedy Totò, Eva e il pennello proibito, who attempted suicide when he realized that he had endorsed a work by master forger Totò Scorcellatti! In that film, Raoul La Spada (played by Mario Carotenuto) was the instigator of the con. Unlike Cassidy, he was a jailbird, but the end of the film put him on the path of becoming Cassidy, with the redemptive sheen of his new wife’s millions.
“… The little fly. That was so droll.” He [Debierue] chuckled reflectively. “Do not feel guilty, M. Figueras.”
This is how Debierue greets Figueras when they meet in the house by the swamp. Figueras smarts with something (shame?). He recalls the review he wrote on an artist called Ray Vint who likes to paint abstracts but supports himself by making portraits.
“In medieval painting, and well into the Renaissance, a fly was painted on Jesus Christ’s crucified body: the fly on Jesus’ body was a symbol of redemption, because a fly represented sin and Jesus was without sin. A fly painted on the person of a layman, however, signified sin without redemption, or translated into “This person is going to Hell!” Ray Vint painted a trompe-l-oeil fly on every portrait.
“… I had hesitated about whether to mention Vint’s symbolic revenge when I wrote about him, not wanting to jeopardize his livelihood. But I had decided, in the end, to bring the matter up because it was a facet of Vint’s personality that said something implicit about the emotionless nature of his abstracts.”
Figueras chose to mention the flies in his review even when he could not be bothered to discuss the abstracts in detail because “Vint’s work simply hadn’t been good enough for a serious in-depth treatment”.
The following article has interesting information on the life of Charles Willeford:
what utter non sense