El Catastro: El Impuesto de Bienes inmuebles IBI

We have examined allusions based on ‘real’ paintings by actual artists and to wholly imaginary paintings by both real and imaginary artists such as Grillo and

Obieto. Before turning to the more difficult case of Paul Gigment, I will briefly review some of the more scattered allusions to painters – from Bronzino to Bruegel to Braque – that appear throughout the novel.

Van first encounters homosexuality at his private prep school, Riverlane: ‘Every dormitory had its catamite. One hysterical lad from Upsala, cross-eyed, loose-lipped, with almost abnormally awkward limbs, but with a wonderfully tender skin texture and the round creamy charms of Bronzino’s Cupid (the big one, whom a delighted satyr discovers in a lady’s bower), was much prized and tortured by a group of foreign boys, mostly Greek and English…’ (32). (See colour illustration 26.)

The painting seems an odd choice for Van’s point de repère. The scene is entirely heterosexual and while the awkwardly positioned Cupid may indeed display ‘a wonderfully tender skin texture and round creamy charms’, he is neither ‘cross- eyed’ nor ‘loose lipped’. On the other hand, Venus, Cupid, Time, and Folly are all central themes in Nabokov’s Ada.

The photo album of Ardis that blackmailer Kim Beauharnais presents to Ada provides the basis for another painting allusion. His picture of the servants dancing

evokes Ada’s comment ‘You can also make out Mr Ward and Mrs French in a bruegelish kimbo (peasant prance) at the farther end of the hall’ (401). The allusion is to Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding in which the dancers display arms ‘akimbo’. Nabokov not only links his favoured protagonists with paintings he admired, but impugns the taste and character of the less favored by assigning them and their scenes to artists and schools he disliked. The most prominent examples are Ada’s husband, Andrey Vinelander, and his sister Dasha. Lucette offers her comments Ada’s husband and sister.

Her Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even for that, collected progressive philistine Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile’s doodles, primitive idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich Heideland. His bride found the ranch yard adorned with a sculpture, if that’s the right word, by old Heinrich himself and his four hefty assistants, a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany, ten feet high, entitled ‘Maternity,’ the mother (in reverse) of all the plaster gnomes and pig-iron toadstools planted by former Vinelanders in front of their dachas in Lyaska (462).

‘Heideland’ (meaning ‘moor,’ ‘heathland’) refers to Henry Moore, famed for his sculptures of ‘Mother and Child’. (The troués refer to the holes characteristic of Moore’s figures.) Van presumably still has Moore in mind when he later refers to his distaste for all sham art, particularly ‘the crude banalities of junk sculpture’

(577).

Ada’s first mention of future husband Andrey Vinelander is that he ‘owns horses, and Cubistic pictures….’ (385). Sister Dasha’s dinner conversation sparkles with her observations on ‘cubist mysticism.’ The very term ‘Cubist’ is one of exe- cration. David van Veen, the dotty architect who memorializes his grandson Eric by building a hundred palatial bordellos to realise the boy’s fantasy scheme, is condemned for slipping into ‘Cubism’: ‘Eric’s grandfather’s range was wide – from dodo to dada, from Low Gothic to Hoch Modern. In his parodies of paradise he even permitted himself, just a few times, to express the rectilinear chaos of Cubism (with ‘abstract’ cast in ‘concrete’) by… such ultra-utilitarian boxes of brick as the maisons closes of El Freud, Austria, or the great-necessity

houses of Dudok in Friesland’ (350).28_{Similarly, it is noted that the luggage of}

Captain Tapper of Wild Violet Lodge, with whom Van fights a duel, is ‘color- blotted’ with ‘Cubistic labels of remote and fabulous places’ (304). Van thus amalgamates two of Nabokov’s bêtes noires – Freud and certain kinds of modern art. The origin of Cubism is closely associated with Pablo Picasso, an idol of the

left, and Georges Braques, whom Van berates in a passing comment: ‘patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant “art” to our humorless forefathers’ (17).

Then there are simply jokes: Peter de Rast, whose century-old lithograph of Ardis with its healthy old oak that appeared as ‘a young colossus protecting four

cows and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare’.29_{In at least one case, an apparently}

non-existent portrait provides motivation for an elaborate description of Marina Durmanov:

Marina’s portrait, a rather good oil by Tresham, hanging above her on the wall, showed her wearing the picture hat she had used for the rehearsal of a Hunting Scene ten years ago, romantically brimmed, with a rainbow wing and a great drooping plume of black-banded silver; … Marina’s face was now made up to imitate her former looks, but fashions had changed, her cotton dress was a rustic print, her auburn locks were bleached and no longer tumbled down her temples, and nothing in her attire or adornments echoed the dash of her riding crop in the picture and the regular pattern of her brilliant plumage which Tresham had ren- dered with ornithological skill (38).

The artist’s name is an anagram of Lady Amherst, wife of a British Governor General of India after whom the pheasant decorating Marina’s hat is named

Chrysolophus amherstiae.