Frenhofer's painting is nothing like Poussin's or Pourbus's, or even that old master Mabuse's.* It's so different they don't even recognise it as painting at first: their eyes pass over it, still in search of the masterpiece they are told is there in that space in front of them. When their eyes are led uncontrovertibly to it, their only explanation is that it is mad.
The unknown masterpiece is not a scenography, but an ichnography. It doesn't represent anything (except momentarily, this fragmented, unstable foot stepping out of it), but is the field of possibilities of the painterly. It is a sort of Cartesian reduction: strip the painterly of any incidentals, of things which are not painterly (this object, this face, this view) and what you have left is nothing but the painterly itself, in its purest form. (The paradoxical logic of the prose poem: get rid of all the usual markers of poetry--rhyme, scansion, lineation--and what you have left is the poetic itself, at its most intense. La Belle Noiseuse is the painterly from which representation can emerge, but with the focus thrown back on that possibility rather than what emerges from it, as that foot emphasises.
Clement Greenberg would have approved. What does Frenhofer's painting look like? The choreographies of a Jackson Pollock, perhaps, with the painter dancing above those huge canvases spread out on the studio floor. The scribbles of Cy Twombly.
* Thanks for the links, Bruce!
