Two Chairs and a Table

Artist: Samij Datta
Title: Two Chairs And A Table (2008)
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper

The painting as it appears has different layers into its visual grammar which try to
explicate the role of memory on childhood in Baudelaire’s poem “I Have Not Forgotten
Our White Cottage” that appeared in Tableaux Parisiens, the second book of Les Fleurs
du mal. The sketchy nature of the cottage in sharp black lines with its subtle use of olive
green and yellow shows a sharp recollection of memories for Baudelaire the poet: “I have
not forgotten our white cottage,/Small but peaceful, near the city”. The sensitivity of the
child and the romantic transfiguration of that association of the child/cottage into verse is
also the same principle for the reader/painter here whose psychograph is the
consciousness of multiple attachments with words/colours/textures/sounds/rhythm. The
surrealism of the painting lies in total diffusion of any conscious understanding of the
thematic strata of the poem. Instead of an imposition of stable meanings, the painting
sinks into an intoxicated disorder where the grammar is the spirit of Baudelaire in the
artist himself.

The tree on the left is an indexical sign for the Roman Goddess, Pomona who was widely
associated with 19th century architecture/décor signifying the blossoming of trees. Here, in the painting, “the plaster Pomona” is a bare tree where an irregular shaped grey paper is the “fugal table-cloth” where candle-like reflections fall when the poet and his mother have quiet supper at sundown. The window on the left is yellow, its falls on the dining table seated with two chairs marked in with blue strips. Yes, it’s the cottage at Nevilly on the outskirts of Paris where Baudelaire enjoyed a pleasant life in the company of her mother, Caroline Baudelaire before she married her next husband, Jacques Aupick.

Baudelaire’s relation with his mother was special, its something clearly mentioned in one
of his letters to her on May 6, 1861: “Long walks, constant acts of tenderness! I
remember the quays, which were so melancholy in the evening.” This was the most
fertile period as he enjoyed his mother’s widowhood and the complete freedom he had
over her. This situation soon changed after she got married to Jacques Aupick and the
poet was estranged from her. So the poet had in him the maternal self, in fact, because of
this deep rooted attachment, Baudelaire is metaphorically androgynous- the red face on
the top of the painting overlooking the cottage is epicene bearing both imprints of a man
and a woman. This is analogy of this kind of androgyny. The childlike simplicity of the
face, its self- mocking posture is a conscious mask that the poet has to wear and tear
down continually to sustain the sensitivity of his perceptions of all that was bestial and
beautiful in a 19th century Parisian city life. – Joy Roy Choudhury