We are not as good as we think. It is difficult to understand how easily we can deceive ourselves. And when we inevitably feel defective, we wish for saner days; too late now to doubt. We are complex, slippery and often elusive beings, always ready to take playful conceptual somersaults so as not to be swept away by ourselves. Self-criticism is often riddled with narcissism. But as with old age, when it is true it frees the ego and makes life lighter. I wonder what happens to artists, their struggle not to be brought down by modesty and if the need for applause ever goes away. The life of an artist is a life of work and discipline, an act of tenacious will and extreme effort, but the history of art is cruel: it chooses only a few as its heroes: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Picasso, Matisse… The rest, with great luck, will have to settle for a place in the shadows where they will be vaguely remembered.

I think about it on my way back from the latest edition of Arco, a manic and crowded fair of things to eat with the eyes and boggle the mind, where every year the game of winners and losers is staged, depending on who has sold or has managed to be seen. It sounds outdated, and it is, the glamorous narrative of the mischievous and inflated self, the myth of the good artist as a fascinating person who wherever he goes, his giant ego always goes with him, as if he himself were a walking work of art. Because you can create with your back to the world and be deeply ambivalent about pride, success and business, but questioning your own worth, even secretly, is a reckless exercise when it comes to something that only the future can decide.

The paintings of Vermeer, who died in poverty, moved Proust so much that he collapsed in the middle of an exhibition. And Rembrandt, after a tragic decline, defeated and humiliated, burdened by debt and repudiated by the same Dutch who revered him and then considered him out of fashion, was buried, like Mozart, in a common grave. Also Stanley Spencer, insensitive to old age with his bangs and schoolboy glasses, lived his last years riddled with debt due to his complicated love life: he was defrauded by his second wife, a lesbian painter who lived with her partner and with who never consummated the marriage, but in exchange allowed him to paint her naked next to him. In the double portraits, both appear exaggerated and grotesque, with a slaughterhouse carnality that broke the clichés of the time and advanced the vision of the bodies of Freud or Bacon. He was one of David Bowie’s favorite painters, and until shortly before his death, in 1959, at the age of 68, he could be seen wandering like a homeless man around Cookham, the town where he was born, happily dragging his paintings in the rickety pram. his childhood.