The fact of the matter

IT is appropriate that West Cork and its annual literary festival should provide a platform for arts writer, cultural historian and biographer Nicholas Fox Weber to talk about his subjects — after all, he’s been coming to this section of craggy coastline for 40 years, and it has played a seminal and supporting role in more than a few of his 14 books.

His titles and researches span the lives of some of the 20th century’s most famous and enigmatic artists and creatives, including those who’ve been creative with their own back-stories. The Polish-French painter Balthus is the most enigmatic and surely the most self-mythologising he’s had to deal with; he got the lucky introduction to talk to Balthus via Rosscarbery art gallery owner Angela Flowers, who had family links to one of Balthus’s early 1930s models, Alice.

But, for all the exotics and elites, from the mythomane Balthus and the Bauhaus movement’s major figures, to architecture’s towering modernist Le Corbusier — incredibly, it fell to Fox Weber to write Le Corbusier’s first major biography — there’s also the elephant in the room, or at least room for the elephant: He has also written ‘The Art of Babar’, on the gentle-giant traveller of watercolour fame and fable.

Fox Weber set up last year’s successful Josef Albers exhibition at Cork’s Glucksman Gallery (he’s now a board member) and his ‘day job’ is running the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the US. Four of Fox Weber’s extra-curricular 14 books have been biographies, and he’s well-advanced on a biography of Piet Mondrian, the Dutch artist he first took note of, aged just 10 years, at a gallery opening he attended with his painter mother and printer father (a patch of West Cork sky can still put him in mind of Mondrian’s ‘Composition With Blue’).

His parents introduced him to West Cork: They came over in 1970, did the Ashford Castle thing, but wanted something “more typically Irish and real”, and fell for a farmhouse overlooking Glandore’s Adam and Eve rocks. Nicholas and his novelist wife Katharine Weber called on their honeymoon in 1976, falling equally in love with the location, which is now a second home to their Connecticut base. They have even given a hostage to local fortune: one of their two adult daughters has married a Corkman.

The writers planned a place of utter simplicity, a Yeatsian idyll, free of distraction, free even of appliances. Now? They have everything, from an ice-cream maker to broadband.

Fox Weber is quite rightly a bit old school when it comes to the internet — “it can make for lazy research, the same lies can be told again and again”.

Getting behind the lies, the concealments, the re-imaginings — that’s the work of proper biography, he stresses, and that fact-checking means going back to primary sources. On Mondrian, he’s refuted the myth that the artist did not attend his mother’s funeral, finding a letter from his brother Karl noting his presence.

For his ‘Le Corbusier: A Life’, it meant travelling to almost all of his buildings (and to his urban projects in India) and trawling through letters he wrote to his mother — who lived to the grand age of 100 — which included graphic accounts of his dalliances with dames, including Josephine Baker. The architect’s mother replied, prosaically, that her roof still leaked. Biography? That’s life.

* Nicholas Fox Weber’s talk Master of Deception: the Biographer’s Encounter with Myths, Lies, Beauty and Genius, is on Monday afternoon, July 8, at the Bantry Literary Festival.