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 London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 16
14 August 2008
As
Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where ‘ordinary people
can do extraordinary things.’ In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly
ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of
York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his
American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled
Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law’s gun collection. By the time
the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled
together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the
couple just ten days before, Entwistle was home in England, living with his
parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from
which he’d woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road.
At
the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the
possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might
be handed over to stand trial at The Hague seemed remote. The acquittal of the
former KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj in April had stunned opinion in Serbia and
added to the sense that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia was a Serb-grinding machine which spat out Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians
and Croats intact. The idea of any more Serbs going on trial was not popular:
even someone like Karadzic, born in Montenegro, long resident in Sarajevo and
regarded by many as a ludicrous figure. His arrest late last month illustrates
how rapidly things are changing in Serbia, and how keen the new pro-European
leadership is to drive its policies forward. The process of EU accession has
long been conditional on the delivery of the big three: Karadzic, Goran Hadzic,
a Croatian Serb wanted for the massacre of Croats in Vukovar in 1991, and Ratko
Mladic, the hands-on commander at Srebrenica. But the capture of Dr Karadzic –
psychiatrist, poet, New Age healer, telegenic bigot and mass murderer – is the
greater public relations coup.
Henri
Matisse’s portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon
d’Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau.
Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse’s painting was scandalous,
and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the
script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two
paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal
L’Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have
haunted our picture of 20th-century art: What one finds above all, particularly
in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the
search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers
of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still ;
painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting
. . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and
individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by
abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings
[des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your
work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and
accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond
to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign
yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of
rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in
instinct.
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