Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

L. John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley's food revolution in the 1970s, Harris worked at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic (1974). He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his "Foodoodles" cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019) and My Little Plague Journal (2022). Mr. Harris coproduced with PBS in 2001 the film Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar and serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Harris's next book is a history of Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto," to be published by Heyday.

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PROLOGUE

She looks at me with dark, sad eyes, a young girl, about ten years old, perhaps a bit older. The sadness I sense is deeper than her years would suggest, something you might see in the eyes of a refugee, a runaway, or a victim of abuse. She seems so alone. But she is not alone. There is someone in the room with her, the artist who has painted this portrait of a girl wearing a vivid red head covering. Who is this mysterious girl? Who is the artist—male or female? French or foreign? From where I’m standing, on the corner of rue Guénégaud and rue Mazarine in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I don’t see a signature on the canvas, though a date is prominent in the upper right-hand corner—12-1-35 (January 12, 1935).

Is the girl wearing a hat or bonnet or headscarf? I can't tell as I approach closer. The unframed canvas, along with other random discards, leans against the wall of a residential building, next to its entry door, between two art galleries. This is up the block from La Palette, a café where I have just had lunch. It’s July 26, 2015, around one in the afternoon. I arrived in Paris yesterday to begin a three-week writing assignment for a food magazine, and this is my first full day in the City of Light.

My guess is that the canvas has come from one of the many art galleries in the area of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter, logically one of the two on either side of the apartment building where it sits. The painting—I assume an oil painting—seems unfinished. The face is nicely painted, but the girl’s upper body is just a series of long, black brushstrokes that outline a broad-collared blouse or jacket. The face, too, is outlined in black. The red head covering, whatever type of headwear it is, lacks detail. The canvas that surrounds the girl is blank except for the date scrawled in black.

Behind the canvas, in the stack of odds and ends, is a fragment of a cloth-covered wooden panel that might be part of a dismantled gallery display, left for passersby. Such giveaways are not an uncommon sight in Paris. What’s uncommon is that a good painting is among them.

I pick up the canvas to take a closer look. Definitely no signature or any other identifying information, front or back. The small nails holding the canvas to the sides of the stretcher bars are rusty, and there is a darkened area running along the bottom front of the canvas, as if the painting had sat outside in wet weather. It seems to me that there is a lot of history in this little painting. I feel oddly drawn to the girl who stares out at me with a story she does not tell.

When I gently run my index finger over the surface, the painted areas feel raised, indicating paint, not a printed surface, as with a giclée print, those awful copies of famous paintings made with inkjet printers. The canvas, la toile, feels rough and dry and looks old. This is a real painting, and though hard to believe, it appears to be abandoned, not forgotten, accidentally dropped or parked temporarily. Still, I wait to see whether there might be someone coming to reclaim it from one of the adjacent galleries. Rather unlikely, given that most galleries are closed now for the summer holidays, les grandes vacances.

I wonder whether an art dealer has forgotten the painting in the rush to leave town? More likely, a dealer has cleaned up a gallery and thrown out unwanted items before leaving. An anonymous, seemingly unfinished portrait bought for a song at an estate sale or flea market would be better off in the hands of someone who loved it than sitting unsold in a gallery or stashed in a closet. Or so I rationalize. It’s just too good, too powerful to leave to an uncertain fate or outright destruction. Maybe I’m its fate. But why it is "good" and "powerful" is not something I carefully think through. It just is. Like a bite of a dish that puts a smile on your face before you identify the ingredients.

Several minutes pass as I stand on the sidewalk with the canvas, lost in my musings, waiting for the painting’s embarrassed owner to arrive and reclaim it. Hoping they don't.

No one does.

So, with canvas in hand and a vague sense of guilt, I continue my stroll toward the Seine, where I’ll turn left at Quai de Conti and head along Quai Malaquais and Quai Voltaire to rue du Bac. Then left on Bac, past the modern art icon Galerie Maeght, to blvd. Saint-Germain. My apartment is just a few hundred yards up blvd. Saint-Germain from the corner.

I hold the canvas with the painted side facing toward me as I walk, the stretcher bars facing out. Am I hiding the canvas to avoid detection by someone who might recognize and claim the painting? Perhaps. But I also feel uncomfortable walking along the street with an uncovered canvas. It may be common in Paris where art is so much a part of everyday life, but I can’t recall ever seeing someone back home doing so. In any case, one would certainly want to protect the painted side of a canvas while moving along crowded, narrow and often wet Parisian streets.

Back at the apartment, I assess my mysterious find, a captivating image of a young girl, presumably living in Paris just five dark years before the onset of World War II and the German Occupation. Edgar Degas once said, “We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?” I can’t stop looking at her. It feels like an important moment at the outset of my stay in Paris, but I can’t say exactly why. That it will launch me on a journey that will change my life I cannot begin to know.