SALVATOR ROSA
Salvator Rosa, Salvator Rosa, with your hippy hat and your insolent stare. Looking like Lennon, looking like Jesus. Acting like Guevara. Talking like Buddha. Salvator Rosa, Salvator Rosa. Client of cardinals. Befriender of brigands. Street-fighting satirist man. Seventeenth century, saturnine cool.
CHAGALL: FIDDLING WHILE ZION BURNS
Your uncle, the village butcher, used to whisper soothing words in the ears of the cattle, before he slit their throats. But when the storm-troopers and the commissars come knocking at the doors of Vitebsk, they won’t be so considerate. Then, all the cherubim of the Tanakh will never bring the chassidim back again. The wandering fiddler still plays but his violin will soon know only one tune – a kaddish – a funeral dirge that will be played six million times and more. It’s playing now but you cannot hear it. You are far away, dreaming of cockerels. And candlesticks. And snow white virgins, with snow white breasts.
LENKA: SHE KNOWS
This is not the idealised Chinese Girl, the submissive Green Lady whose face used to glance down from a million suburban living-room walls. This the real woman. This is the woman who knows you will betray her love. This is the woman who stares out from your own living-room wall, whose eyes watch every screaming-til-you-are-red-in-the-face argument you have with the wife you went back to. This is the woman whose portrait you dare not sell for fear of guna-guna. If you’d stayed with this woman, you would have become a great artist. But you followed the money. This is how Jesus looked, when he gazed upon Judas at The Last Supper.
(Lenka was the mistress of the artist Tretchikoff during the Second World War.)