It’s not a novel. This is not a test. It’s not a scenario.
It’s Martine Delvaux.
The very beautiful It could have been a movie is the book in which the writer reveals herself the most, talking about her immense love for art, and the courage it takes when you want to devote your life to it. Even if this leads to a world that often repeats injustices. Women have been so excluded from the canon in all artistic spheres that we understand why many of them have refused the feminist label, for fear that they would not be taken seriously in their vocation. “The fear of not being recognized as an artist is very heavy, and I completely understand it,” Martine Delvaux told me. “This book talks a lot about the place of women artists, how many are never recognized, not just during their lifetime, but never at all. We suffer from this in literature, but in visual arts, I believe it is even more difficult. »
The project for this book was born from a meeting with a producer who, seduced by his Thelma, Louise & me, asked him to write a screenplay on the relationship between Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle, two sacred monsters of abstract expressionism. But nothing interested him less than exploring the photos of a couple of artists. But when he mentions the existence of a third person, Martine discovers his angle, which will become an obsession: Hollis Jeffcoat. Also a painter, this young American lived with the couple, then with Riopelle, who left Mitchell for her, before she left him eight years later.
Who was Hollis Jeffcoat, often reduced to the guardian of Mitchell and Riopelle’s dogs in biographies, even though she never stopped painting?
However, when Martine Delvaux discovered her, Hollis Jeffcoat had recently died, at age 65, and the archives were rather silent on her existence; he will therefore have to invent this mysterious character between the biographical facts of Mitchell and Riopelle.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Martine Delvaux was interested in Hollis Jeffcoat, an American painter who lived with Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle.
Four years of research, interviews and writing led to It could have been a movie, in which we feel that Martine Delvaux herself is trying to escape the undeniable attraction of Mitchell and Riopelle to talk about Jeffcoat. “When I was writing this book, I identified with Hollis, sometimes more with Joan or Jean Paul, I wandered from one pole to the other, but I love all three of them,” explains the writer. I chose my side, but I really had to force myself, because they are bottomless wells of admiration, talents and interests. »
We cannot ignore Martine Delvaux in her writings, because her questions, her doubts and her intimacy are part of her approach, like visible brushstrokes. We always know where the narrator is speaking from who thinks in her disconcertingly honest books. How porous it is and penetrated by what surrounds it; everything shatters at Delvaux who puts the pieces back together to make something else, like an artist.
We can read this confidence in the book: “I am angry with you for having given up your arms, I am angry with you for having chosen comfort, calm, peace, I am angry with you for having opted for safe painting practice, I blame you, that’s all, and it has more to do with me than with you. It has to do with what I wish I had known earlier in my life, and really understood, understood that what would guide my life would be writing. »
“She spent the last 15 years of her life on this island, Sanibel, Florida,” says Martine Delvaux. I wondered what she sacrificed in this choice to live a materially comfortable life. Basically, the question is for me too. What do we sacrifice when we say that we are going to be a writer, but also a university professor, or a journalist? We actually give ourselves two jobs, and something is obviously sacrificed. »
Elusive, Hollis Jeffcoat is not so much a woman who flees as an artist who protects herself. It took character to paint alongside these giants, and to love them without being swallowed up. Because Hollis, Joan and Jean Paul really loved each other, all three of them, and remained in contact throughout their lives, even after separations, and even if, in their interviews, they sometimes ignored each other supremely. At the end of his life, when asked who his teachers were, Hollis Jeffcoat did not mention Mitchell and Riopelle, which amazed Delvaux. “I think my heart broke!” No really ? I think she didn’t want to go there. »
Recognize yourself in another
The loft in which Martine Delvaux lives is filled with works of art, most of them created by women, because “it is an act of love towards art to look at the work of a another woman and to recognize herself there,” she says. “My aesthetic and intellectual filiation is from woman to woman. This is something I’ve been working on since testing Girls in series, how can we be in a community. How, in Western culture, we tend to group women against each other rather than putting them together, as if the supreme value was the man, to whom we always compare them. My whole book is about how, on the one hand, women are forgotten, and on the other, how they recognize themselves. »
Martine Delvaux almost bought a Jeffcoat painting at an auction, but it was far too expensive for her means. She still got her hands on two lithographs which she shows me, Laurentians And Melrose. The writer went to visit Jeffcoat’s widow on Sanibel. “The workshop was as it was, nothing had moved, the brushes, the cans of paint, everything was there,” she says, her eyes shining.
His impossible dream would be to have a painting from the period when Jeffcoat and Mitchell were painting together in Vétheuil, France.
“I don’t know how she felt, but it must have been amazingly rich to be able to be together in a workshop, drinking whiskey, with opera playing, the dogs there, talking about art and painting for nights. Can you imagine? »
I don’t know if this could make a movie, but one thing is certain: It could have been a movie is a work of art that pays homage to the love between artists. And which leaves Martine Delvaux on the Jeffcoat mystery, but also on the truth of the creative gesture. “His goal in life was not to give of himself, but to paint, I stay with that. What she gave me, apart from my affection for this story, was her love for painting. That’s where we would have agreed, I have the same love for writing. It’s stronger than everything else. »
In bookstores September 20
It could have been a movie
Heliotrope
325 pages