Francis-Noël Thomas

Rogier van der Weyden and James Ensor: Line and Its Deformation

June 3, 2014

Nonfiction from NER 35.1.

The grand and bombastic building on the Leopold de Waelplaats in Antwerp that has housed the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) since 1890 closed on October 3, 2010, for a major interior reconstruction that is not expected to be completed before 2017. During this reconstruction, some of the museum’s better known nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings have been exhibited as far from Antwerp as Japan; some of its rare fifteenth-century panel paintings were exhibited last year in the beautifully preserved sixteenth-century Rockox House, just a twenty-minute walk from the museum.

There is something to be said for seeing nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings and fifteenth-century paintings in separate and respectively congenial settings, but the 1890 building did more than provide wall space for paintings that had little in common with its architectural ethos and belonged to separate and sometimes antagonistic cultural worlds. The museum went beyond exhibiting individual paintings, even individual styles of painting; it exhibited antagonistic concepts of painting.

When it was inaugurated in 1810, the museum absorbed what had been the collection of the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. In 1841 that collection was supplemented by a bequest from one of the earliest and greatest collectors of Early Netherlandish painting, Florent van Ertborn, a former mayor of Antwerp. In the 1920s, it began to collect contemporary painters, notably James Ensor.

Van Ertborn’s collection was assembled at a time when the Early Netherlandish masters were out of fashion, their work unknown to all but a tiny public. Panels from what is now one of the most famous European paintings of the late middle ages, the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), were kept out of sight by nineteenth-century bishops of Ghent, who were scandalized by the life-size nude representations of Adam and Eve.

When I first went to Antwerp, it was expressly to see paintings that were part of the van Ertborn bequest, although I knew nothing about the bequest at the time and had never heard of Florent van Ertborn. I had fallen in love with the Early Netherlandish paintings I had seen in American museums and in printed images illustrating books on the subject. I knew very little of the history of the painters’ reputation.

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Francis-Noël Thomas taught art history at Truman College, City Colleges of Chicago for twenty-nine years. He is joint author with the cognitive scientist Mark Turner of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton University Press, 1994; second edition 2011). His previous essays in New England Review include “Tea” (33.1) and “On the rue Saint-André-des-arts” (31.2).

NER Essays Cited as “Notables” in Best American Essays

October 1, 2013

Three NER essays were selected as “Notables” in Best American Essays 2013, edited by Cheryl Strayed and Robert Atwan.

In addition to Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame” being selected for inclusion in the collection, three more essays were cited as “Notables.” Those cited were Karen Holmberg’s “Songs and Calls of the Human Species” (33.1), Eileen Pollack’s “Ranch House,” (32.4), and Francis-Noel Thomas’s “Tea” (33.1).

A full list of selections and notables can be found on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt website, and the book can be purchase there and at your local booksellers.

The delay

July 5, 2012

Line 89 to Cardinal Lemoine-Monge | By Francis-Noël Thomas

I see her for twenty minutes. We don’t exchange a word.

I am waiting for a bus on an autumn evening after leaving the Bibliothèque nationale where I have spent the afternoon. I’ve been in Paris for a month and am about to go back to Chicago in three days. The bus is late; it starts to rain lightly; the bus shelter is overfull; strangers begin to talk to one another.

“How long have you been waiting?”

“Is there a strike?”

“The indicator says the next bus will come in five minutes.”

“Yes, but it’s been the same for the past half-hour.”

Then, I see her in the crowd. She has an arresting face. As soon as I see her, I want to know her. I listen to her voice. She is taking the delay as something to be laughed at, as if it were an agreeable surprise. I ignore everyone else waiting for the bus in order to pay attention to her. She does not seem to notice. The bus comes at last; crowded, but I get a seat. I am facing her, but we are separated by a seat. She’s reading, her face reflected in the window of the bus, and she’s more compelling than any of Vermeer’s women reading letters. The face is not beautiful; it is better than that – it is interesting. Absorbed as she is in reading, her face becomes an icon of intelligence. The bus reaches my stop.

The next time I am in Paris waiting for that bus I think of her. I remember her face, intent on her reading. I would recognize her in an instant. She has become the picture I want on the cover of the book I will never write, the book about being passionate.

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Francis-Noël Thomas and the cognitive scientist Mark Turner were awarded a Prix du rayonnement de la langue et la littérature françaises by the Académie française in 1996 for their study of classic prose style, Clear and Simple as the Truth.

Bricolage

March 6, 2012

In “Paris at Street Level” (NER 30.3, 2009) Francis-Noël Thomas ruminates on changes in the city through the lens of reading Georges Perec:

Perec undertook a number of documentary projects before he immersed himself in La vie mode d’emploi. One of them consisted of walking up and down the street on which he had spent most of his childhood and adolescence, first one side, then the other, noting what he saw, building by building. He did this at intervals of six months. I don’t know how long he kept it up, but before long he noticed changes—a surprising number of them on this street he knew so well. His notations show how a city changes incessantly, and since I loved to walk in the extended neighborhood of my hotel, where I have stayed for a month or so at a time for over thirty years, I have noticed the same phenomenon. Every day, I pass a flower shop that used to be a café. Across the street from the hotel there is an art gallery that was once a bakery, and a few blocks down the rue Monge towards the Place Maubert I pass a shop that now sells motorcycles; it used to be a shop selling bandes-dessinées (books of comic-strip art) and before that it was a shop selling Indian fabrics. Past the Place Maubert on the rue Lagrange, I try to avert my eyes from a little supermarket—part of a chain—because the space was formerly occupied by a bricolage called Aux Mille Couleurs, where I could always find just what I was looking for—wooden coat-hangers, a soap dish, a small hair drier, handmade scented soap from Provence (unwrapped), a vase, a pair of socks, a sharp knife for cutting cheese. It was a shop I loved. It’s been gone for six or seven years now, and I miss it all over again every time I walk past the detestable little supermarket that has supplanted it. For a long time, I couldn’t pass it without hearing a voice in my head telling me, as if I didn’t know, “Mille Couleurs used to be just here.” I didn’t take it for granted when it was there, but neither did I imagine it would just disappear one day, leaving me to feel as if I had lost something irreplaceable that had come to mean something to me—a cufflink, an old photograph, a favorite scarf, a piece of my heart.

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