[The following excerpt is taken from the fourth chapter of D H Laven’s much anticipated work-in-progress ‘The Story of Forgotten Art’. As Laven writes in his introduction: ‘There is no such thing as forgotten art. There are only forgotten artists. And a hell of a lot of them too’. In this extract, he looks at the case of Eugene Matendré, a man once described as ‘if not the best, then at least the best-looking artist in France']
In June 1926, in the small village of Essanay outside the town of Montargis near the city of Paris, the body of a naked old man was dragged from a river. At the age of ninety four, Eugene Matendré had decided to drown himself. It wasn’t an easy decision, as his suicide note (well presented, with a firm sense of design) attests:
‘For ten years I was unsure as to how to kill myself. Several times I drank turpentine, but it seemed only to make me drunk. Once I ate a whole tube of Burnt Sienna oil paint, but aside from constipation and the odd amusing hallucination, it had no effect on me. I tried Yellow Ochre and Vermillion, with similar results. What a world is this! I have wanted for some time to construct for myself a romantic death, so as to attract some belated interest in my life, but it is much harder than I imagined. Drowning is my last chance…’
The penultimate line is instructive. Matendré saw death as his last opportunity to impress the world with his creativity. His suicide was thus his last ‘work’, though by no means his best. Back in Paris, the critics almost exclusively made no mention of it, save a single line of text at the bottom of a page in L’Escargot: ‘Drowning, by E Matendré. Composition weak, as always’. There was to be no belated interest for this enterprising artist. Shunned in his life, he looked set to be shunned in his death also. And so he has been, thus far. In the seventy nine years since the last few stubborn lily-pads were peeled off his sodden corpse, he has gained only two mentions in art historical texts, one of them a mistake. His paintings, at one time sought out by at least four people, are instead consigned to a wine cellar in Bordeaux, where they are the victims of damp and tipsy vermin. But in this sad story of forgotten talent, it is not only the artist that loses out. It is the audience as well.
It seems to me no mere coincidence that Eugene Matendré died in the same year as Claude Monet. As a pair they complement each other. Both of them created their most intriguing work late in life. They lived barely twenty minutes away from each other and, in these late stages, took as their subject that which they found in their gardens. As well as this, they both had beards. This, however, is where the similarities end. A vital distinction between the two painters – besides the obvious difference in their present popularity – must be made, which is summed up in the following statements:
Where Monet excites pleasure, Matendré stimulates vomiting.
Where Monet obsessively painted water lilies, Matendré obsessively painted the remains of a savaged swan that lay floating in his famously stagnant garden pond for more than two years (maybe providing the inspiration for his own demise)
Where Monet painted big near the end of his life, Matendré’s works got progressively smaller (his last painting, ‘That Dead Dust’, can only be seen through a microscope).
All of which can be accommodated into a dangerously generalising yet alluringly simple conclusion:
Where Monet chased beauty, Matendré chased ugliness.
From 1900 onwards, Matendré’s paintings are almost exclusively of rotting matter. Before the turn of the century, he painted very little. He never had any art education and spent most of his life as a cake-maker, disturbed by brief stints in the army, the details of which are unknown. Concerning his cake-making, it is noted that he was known in the region for making a not unpopular fáce-malé, which is a French version of flapjack made with absinthe and garlic. He came to painting late in life, finding it in ‘an attractive alternative to murder’, the pleasure of which he may have tasted either in the army or the cake-making business (or both). In either case, it is interesting to note the extent to which the themes of death and decay were taken up in his painting, from his early masterpieces – ‘Remains of the Frog Squashed by the Fallen Pot Plant’ (1902) and ‘Mould Formations’ (1910) – to the aforementioned ‘Dead Swan in Pond’ series that he embarked upon in the 1920s. It is also tempting to see parallels between the thickness of his paint surfaces and the practical business of icing to which he must have given many hours of his younger life. Ultimately, however, I am inclined to believe that Matendré’s obsession with death is not an unnatural phenomenon; rather one that we are inclined to consider deviant by way of our own mortal anxieties. His secret admiration for mould, in particular, is one that I suspect many of us share, without wishing to admit it. Related to this, also, is the long standing tradition of ‘nose-picking’, which in some cases involves the actual consumption of discharged bodily matter. It is not a surprise to find out that Matendré was an unashamed ‘nose-picker’, a fact to which he found time to allude to even in his suicide note:
‘Another thing I feel that I must say to those who care to listen is this: I not only enjoy inserting my finger up my nose and carefully removing out the contents, but regularly I also eat these very contents! And, damn it, they taste good! Better than Yellow Ochre oil paint!’
A detailed history of nose-picking amongst the artistic community has, unfortunately, yet to be written. Until then, the precise relevance that this practice may have had on the artist’s work can only be imagined.
As I mentioned earlier, the failure of art-historians to register the existence of Matendré has created a negative effect not only for the artist and for his few living relatives (who could do with making some money) but also for the world in general. This amounts to saying that not only does the art-world need Matendré, but that his art-work is worthy of – nay, desperately deserves – serious critical attention.
As to why it hasn’t received this attention thus far, I suspect that many readers have already come to their own conclusions, based primarily (I suspect) on my prior observation that being subjected to the artist’s work is very likely to cause severe nausea in the viewer. This, to use a common colloquial term, is no doubt somewhat of a ‘turn-off’. And yet it is my firm belief that such a sickness as Matendré’s paintings may provoke is, in the end, well worth the bother. Indeed, it was through, if not during, the process of uncontrollable vomiting that I personally came to appreciate the subtle beauty of Matendré’s work. With this in mind, I would like to end this brief investigation with a look at my all-time favourite work by the artist, entitled ‘Mauled Worm’ (1909).
Matendré was forever coming across dead creatures in his garden and he never let the occasion pass without making a painted record of it. His responses, however, are as a whole less a realistic documentary of death than an externalised expression of mortal suffering built around a recognisable yet abstracted structure of natural decomposing forms – to put it simply. The eponymous mauled worm is presented as a series of representative lines set apart from the characteristic – that is to say ‘traditional worm’ – colour[8] Like an unsteady-handed toddler’s attempt to fill in the spaces of a black and white drawing with rough coloured crayons, Matendré’s painting style is seemingly fluid and unconstrained. And yet he is no naïve painter. ‘Mauled Worm’ is first and foremost an intellectual painting, which addresses some of the deepest philosophical questions. Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do people enjoy cutting worms in half and watching both sides wriggle away?
Lest I seem to suggest that Matendré is a self-indulgent genius, working on his own terms, there is also a political context to this painting. If we are to presume that it was created in the second half of 1909, we cannot help but notice that it coincides with a oft forgotten but essential political event of the time; namely, the resignation of one Pierre Revver from the Ministry of Agriculture. Revver was a local hero – the working class boy who made it big – but the pressures of his job, not helped by the Garlic Crisis of 1907 and an illicit string of affairs with farmers’ wives, were to destroy his dream. By the time he resigned Revver had already degenerated into a dumb gibbering monkey. Some argue that he didn’t hand in his own resignation, but few deny that this was the best thing for him. Revver was to live until 1954, but he said his last word in 1909.
How does this relate to ‘Mauled Worm’? The clue is in the name. The French for worm is, of course, ‘ver’. The name Revver consists of two ‘ver’s, one printed forwards, one backwards. A worm split into two, each side wriggling off in a different direction. The tension between these two sides of the worm, echoed in the ultimately destructive tensions between Revver’s career and sexual exploits, is very much evident in Matendré’s painting.
D H Laven, 2005
