The pinning-on of Sfar’s decoration was a thoroughly French act. It took place in one of the bare but historic seventeenth-century salons of the Gallimard offices in the Rue Gaston-Gallimard. Packed with Sfar’s excited friends, mainly under 40, from the bande-dessinée (comic-book) world, the room was also alive with audible and visible enthusiasm for Blake, who carried out the ceremony in faultless French. ‘Ahs’ of delightment followed from the audience when he presented Sfar with a large drawing of him as a knight on horseback – yet another example of Blake’s ability to conjure and combine many ideas (knight, seventeenth century, portrait, identity, inspiration) to produce something perfectly suited to the recipient and to the moment.
Blake’s own contribution to the promotion of French culture, both in France and in the UK, has of course also been recognized: he has moved through the ranks of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, having been nominated both Chevalier and Officier, with ceremonies at the French Institute and Residence in London, where he was decorated by his publisher, friend and greatest French supporter, Christine Baker, and by the French Ambassador. He then joined the prestigious Légion d’Honneur as Chevalier, an honour presented to him at the French Ambassador’s residence by the visiting current French minister of Culture and Communication, Aurélie Filippetti.
French recognition
Paris was also the scene of the achievement in France that Blake is probably proudest of: the exhibition mentioned earlier, which he guest-curated for the reopening of the Musée du Petit Palais. This extraordinary building faces its bigger and more monumental brother, the Grand Palais, in that grand area of the city, mainly formal gardens, which borders the Seine on the Right Bank and stretches from the Louvre at the eastern end, takes in the Tuileries Gardens, and fringes the Elysée Palace on its west side. Designed by Charles Girault for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, but in a state of genteel decay 100 years later, the Petit Palais was restored to its former glory in 2005. The plan was to find an opening exhibition which would remind a broad audience about the museum’s collections, which had languished in the stores for the five years of the closure. A connection to people working for the Musées de la Ville de Paris, a group to which the Petit Palais belongs, led to a lunch attended by, among others, Gilles Chazal, at the time Director of the Petit Palais. His conversation with Blake at this lunch convinced him that Blake would be an interesting choice of curator for his opening exhibition. Not only did he know about the art represented in the collections (mainly nineteenth-century French), but he could make drawings on the walls, much as he had done at the National Gallery for the exhibition Tell Me a Picture, and invite a new kind of audience into the building. As a result, he offered Blake carte blanche to guest-curate an exhibition – something common today, but much more unusual in France in 2005, where professional expertise is so trammelled. Blake was invited to trawl the extensive reserve collections and I was asked to act as a consultant on the project, having already co-curated Tell Me a Picture with him in 1999–2000.
Blake would make a selection of works from the stores and then ‘illustrate’ the exhibition with a series of his own drawings, enlarged and printed on acetate, which would occupy some of the spaces of the 15-metre-high walls, and act as ‘exhibition guides’. As Christopher Frayling, at the time Rector of the RCA, described it: ‘a huge Quentin-style gateway to an exhibition of nineteenth-century paintings’.
The collections included paintings, prints and drawings by many of Blake’s favourite artists including Daumier, Steinlen, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Forain. After several lengthy research sessions in the museum’s store on the Boulevard Peripherique, Blake identified ‘women’ as a unifying theme for the exhibition. The works he eventually chose to illustrate it were a very characteristic selection: apart from a wispy fin-de-siècle vision of Ophelia drowning by the hardly known Paul Albert Steck (died 1924) and one or two more fanciful pictures, the images were all of everyday life. A Vuillard lithograph of a woman washing dishes in a kitchen here, there two laundresses engaged in some minor confrontation in a Steinlen print, a girl next to her bicycle representing feminine freedom in 1903, by Comerre, a mother and her two restless little daughters in a Degas pastel. Degas was one of a few famous names, but the pictures were mainly many little, speaking scenes, which were echoed by those taking place between Blake’s small winged figures who hovered around the framed works, leading visitors towards the artists, travellers, laundresses, goddesses, mothers and lovers, and acting as visual commentators. Aude Mouchonnet, the young gallery curator assigned to assist on the project internally, came up with the clever title for it: Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine. This suggested both Blake’s familiarity with French art (the second part of the title being the name of a painting by Courbet, a version of which is in the Petit Palais collection), the location of the museum and perhaps also his own particular enjoyment of the company of French women.
Ironically it was two French women who also made the experience of working on Demoiselles less straightforward than it might have been: the two senior internal curators who advised on the exhibition at first showed some barely concealed Gallic scepticism at the idea of a British illustrator with no formal training in art-history being let loose in their picture stores. However it was noticeable that by the time the exhibition opened, they had begun to smile more; over the course of many meetings Blake was always quietly respectful towards them (as he is to everyone), but his confidence in his own artistic aims for the exhibition remained resolutely intact. This appeared to have a softening effect and in the end they were quite helpful.
The exhibition turned the towering white expanses of the new exhibition galleries into graceful, dancing spaces. These included cleverly signalled views into the beautiful and surprising interior garden, with its palms and grasses, and mosaic-bottomed pools. Blake, said the Figaro online review, has ‘created a rhythm between these works and his own drawings . . . displaying both his wit, his delicacy and all the poetry of his universe.’ (Il a rythmé la présentation de celles-ci de dessins de sa main sur les cimaises du Petit Palais, révélant à la fois son humour, sa délicatesse et toute la poésie de son univers.) And it is worth quoting the director Gilles Chazal’s catalogue introduction to show how completely he understood the philosophy behind this exhibition:
A work of art lives only through the gaze cast on it by its viewers. And gazes come in many varieties; when they are negligent, the work slumbers on, when erudite it remains caught in the net of its original context. When the gaze is that of an aesthete, the work sings with all its components, materials, forms and colours. When it is poetic, it opens up the work’s unbounded potential, for sensibility, comic or tragic reality or for dreams . . . for all of humanity, in fact!
Quentin Blake’s gaze is in the last category. Because the Petit Palais admires his works, and loves the man, and has trust in his talent, it has given him carte blanche. Carte blanche to choose from the reserves works that will delight him. Carte blanche to let him leave his own traces on the exhibition walls, which are so resonant of the place’s history, to make drawings that will charm the visitors.
So the walls of the galleries have begun to float like clouds, and the ladies on the banks of the Seine to speak, discuss, cry and laugh, and sing . . . The works of art have really come alive!
Blake has also been honoured by too many French literary invitations to list comprehensively here: poignantly, because I happen to write this the day after the murder of among others four Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, he was given a spread in that publication. Catherine Meurisse, a fellow cartoonist who missed being murdered by arriving late at the office on that fateful day, also interviewed him at his French home and out of it created the touching centre-spread on page 143.
In 2012 he was asked to illustrate Le Figaro Littéraire, an occasional and respected supplement to the main paper, which comes out for the ‘rentrée littéraire’. The word ‘r entrée’ (return) usually means the general
return after the (long!) French summer holidays. Associated with ‘littéraire’, however, it refers to the early autumn period when most books are published, when publishers engage in heavy promotion of their authors in the hope of their winning one of the many literary prizes that are awarded in the season. Blake’s illustrations were accompanied by an article about him, which conveys France’s appreciation of him in succinct, if rhetorical, lines: ‘Le dessinateur anglais nous fait l’honneur d’illustrer ce numéro du Figaro littéraire consacré non à la rentrée des enfants, qu’il gâte tant, mais à celle des livres, qu’il vénère .’ (We are honoured to have [Blake] to illustrate this edition of Figaro Littéraire for us, which is dedicated to the rentrée not of children, who he so indulges, but of books, which he worships.)
It is a mark of Blake’s grounded character though, that, honoured as he felt to be asked to be involved in Figaro Littéraire, he was almost as pleased to be awarded the ‘Prix Littéraire Quentin Blake’, not in Paris this time, but by the primary school children of the town of Thouars in the Department of Deux-Sèvres. This was a prize that he couldn’t help winning, because each child had to vote for their favourite of Blake’s books, which were classed in different categories, and he says he was touched by the amount of preparation and research on the part of both children and teachers that went into this project.
So Blake has been very widely recognized in France, from enthusiastic young schoolchildren to the intellectual heights of the TV Talk Show Apostrophes. This programme, which ran from 1975 until 1990, was hosted by Bernard Pivot, a tough ex-Figaro journalist, and became one of the most watched and influential cultural programmes of its age, even being criticized by the writer Régis Debray for ruling as ‘a virtual dictatorship over publishing markets’. Blake did understand how important and rare it was for an illustrator, a children’s illustrator as he then was, to appear before Pivot, the high priest of literature. Pivot had in fact told Gallimard that he would never do a programme about children’s literature and Blake was invited on an ‘entente cordiale’ thematic with other Franco-British personalities. Since his French was not yet the smooth running machine it is now, Blake practised his answers to possible questions with Christine Baker, most assiduously, she says. In the event, though, she remembers that, in true French fashion, Pivot was utterly distracted by one of his other guests, the actress Jane Birkin, and Blake and the rest of the guests barely got a look-in. Blake also recalls that in the pre-programme Green Room chat, Pivot, unfamiliar with children’s book authors as he was, leafed through Cockatoos and said in a surprised voice: ‘It’s quite good, isn’t it?’
Gallimard themselves have paid homage to Blake in significant ways, which are testimonies to the respect in which he is held both internally at the company and more widely by its readers. One was in the Gallimard centenary in 2011, which the publishers celebrated in various ways throughout the year. A lavish 400-page publication, Gallimard 1911–2011: un siècle d’edition, contained a page (only one – children’s literature is still not rated in France in the way Baker would like) about the Gallimard Jeunesse imprint, with its slogan ‘de la lecture à la littérature’ (from reading to literature), and Blake was the person invited to write it, which he did. Secondly, at the fortieth anniversary of Gallimard Jeunesse, the publisher Antoine Gallimard made a speech in which only two or three of their authors were mentioned, one of them being Blake. Lastly (and this is perhaps harder for a British readership to appreciate), his drawings for Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide, which first appeared in the Folio Society edition (in a translation by Tobias Smollett) in 2011, reappeared in the Gallimard Folio Classique imprint in the following year. Folio Classique paperbacks are the French equivalent of Penguin Classics, a collection of the most prestigious titles of world literature, but somehow even more revered in France than Penguin is in the UK. ‘Can you imagine?’ says Baker. ‘There’s nothing more traditional and literary than this imprint. And Candide, a sacred French text, illustrated by a children’s illustrator? It was illustrated in colour; we had to change the paper especially for him, and nobody made a fuss.’
Gallimard’s embracing of Blake is not just about his value to them in terms of sales or marketing; it is an acknowledgement that in the 30 years they have worked with him they have seen something about the man (which many others in France now do) that is at once reflected in his art but is also bigger than his art. They and countless other French organizations and people see how his wholehearted engagement with French art and literature has given him something to say to even the most culturally insular Frenchman. In this British man they recognize a kind of learned humanity which comes through a lifetime of observing, reading about, and finally drawing his fellow human beings, which in some ways finds its match in great French artists such as Daumier. To repeat Pennac’s words: ‘Quentin Blake dessine moins des individus que ce qui fait de nous des individus.’ (What Quentin Blake draws is not so much individuals as what makes us individuals.) .
‘La Dédicace’, from Le Figaro, Literary Supplement, 2012.
From Blake’s series of drawings for Angers Maternity Hospital, Angers, France (2011)
5 Flying (and swimming)
Quand son crayon se laisse aller naturellement sur une feuille de papier . . . c’est un oiseau qu’il dessinerait naturellement, ou quelque chose qui plane ou qui, s’envole, ou qui céde a une énergie de l’évasion, quelque chose qui s’en va, quoi. (When his pencil lets itself go on a sheet of paper, it’ll be a bird that he will draw, or something hovering or flying away, something yielding to the energy of flight, something taking off, in other words.) Daniel Pennac, Les Ateliers de la nuit, radio programme for France Culture
Birds – symbols of Quentin Blake
In Quentin Blake’s studio, the artist’s tools, paper, books, furniture, drawings and mementoes, even the walls, conspire to create a wonderfully coherent portrait of the man and his work. But when visiting it for the first time in the 1990s, I remember catching sight of a magazine-cover that didn’t quite belong to the picture of Blake I was gradually putting together in my head: Psitta Scene, with its unsophisticated photographic cover of a green and red parrot, seemed out of place in this artistic-literary powerhouse. But I was wrong. Blake has a great fondness for parrots: ‘They are very intelligent creatures,’ he says, and members of the psittacidae family do keep alighting in Blake’s work, either as principal characters such as in Cockatoos, or as the archetypal Blake detail: thoroughly incidental, but somehow lifting the page and making it sing, and the reader smile.
But parrots and their relations are not the only birds for Blake; many distinct varieties appear where the text calls for them, as do other more generic versions. Birds, Blake would say, have this positive about them: in common with flowers and mushrooms, you call them by their proper names, and they are like us, they walk on two legs. This last fact has also prompted him, late in his career, to create a separate Blakean genre: birds which/who (?) behave like people.
Blake’s fondness for them may in part go back to childhood – he still has a book he bought when he was about 12 by Eric Hosking, an innovative bird-photographer at the time. Perhaps these dramatic and unfamiliar black-and-white images stayed in Blake’s mind, helping to spark a lifelong attraction for both birds and the act of flying. Of course, the manner in which his cockatoos make their inky, scratchy journeys across the page has nothing to do with Hosking’s barn owls, with their sharp, fanned-out wings, in the bird books; but both image-makers clearly find the bird a subject of delight and wonder. For Blake the illustrator they also have their particular uses on the printed page, as we shall see.
This chapter follows the birds and other airborne things in Blake’s work, both for adults and in his better-known output for children. It also explores a metaphorical theme of people ‘off-the-ground’ in general, either in the air or in the water. It asks whether the constant recurrence of this type of imagery may be linked as much to its symbolic value as to Blake�
�s fondness for wildlife, genuine as that is. So it looks at flying as a kind of underlying sign for something which I will call imagination, which characterizes all of Blake’s drawing (and, in some ways, all of his lived life).
Childhood bird-watching and reading about birds led to a good knowledge of bird species and their habits and, early on, Blake had in his head a ready-made bird repertoire, which he used as subjects from the earliest times. Members of the Rahtz family remember that their father Roland, who also taught at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, had once whitewashed his garage wall and was happy for Blake to use it as a large white ‘canvas’. Blake proceeded to paint a large cockerel, using house painting brushes and black paint. ‘It was six foot high at least, a great big splashy picture’, remembers Madeleine Rahtz. This memory is interesting for two reasons; first, it is one of the few childhood recollections that the sisters have of Blake (Blake is about 10 years older), and so it suggests how impressive the event was. Second, it’s a very early example of Blake working on a large scale. His reputation as an illustrator of world-famous children’s books sometimes trumps that of Blake the creator of images ‘beyond the page’: although these are mainly drawings scaled up for printed reproduction, they are planned to be big, and a few, such as those which covered a building wrap in King’s Cross, were very large indeed.
The Rahtz sisters also recall another occasion with Ajax, their pet jackdaw. This bird had been rescued as an abandoned fledgling by a teacher colleague of their father’s, who had then brought it home to Hurst Road, where it lived for a while in admirable freedom in an open-fronted cage. The sisters remember that Blake was once at their house, doing a drawing of Ajax, when it suddenly swooped down and settled on the end of what was either a silver pen, according to one, or perhaps a pencil with a silvered rubber-holder at the end – they can’t decide who was right. Whichever, they thought that the bird must have been after a shiny object, of the kind that jackdaws are said to hoard in their nests. This picture of untamed nature, and the more docile Blake at work, was clearly also a significant memory. Today Blake uses pencils much less than brushes, waxy crayons and, principally, pens of various sorts. These include a clutch of birds’ feathers, and it is typical of Blake that he once drew a picture of a lively vulture using a vulture’s quill.
Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination Page 15
