The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (32 page)

Convergence
was a great success in its jigsaw format. It rapidly became a conversation piece and a status symbol. Those who completed it were so proud of their efforts that they converted their handiwork into coffee tables and wall plaques. Soon the jigsaw was better known than Pollock's original canvas (which is still to some the object of derision, and always at risk of parody), and visitors went to the gallery in Buffalo in search of the jigsaw, not the painting. It made Springbok prosperous. A replica of a Pollock seemed to evade the philistine suspicion with which the source work was regarded, and the kitsch art of the jigsaw had mysteriously made Abstract Expressionism popular with a middlebrow clientele.
Convergence: The Jigsaw
was featured in Newsweek in December 1964, and Katie Lewin did a jigsaw tour of thirty cities in thirty days, talking about it. This must have been much more fun than a book tour. It became more famous than Pollock himself. It also introduced a vogue for more and more difficult adult puzzles, some of them perversely difficult – all white, all black, all blue, or, like 'Little Red Riding Hood's Hood', all red. A new vogue for difficulty had begun.

The Lewins sold their company to Hallmark in 1967, and it
continued to thrive, but
Convergence
remains the most celebrated of Springbok's products. The original painting still hangs in Buffalo, in the Albright-Knox Gallery, and during the BBC Radio 4 programme we can hear presenter Alan Dein talking to Ken Wayne, the Curator of Modern Art, as he scatters the pieces of the puzzle on the gallery floor in front of it and then attempts to assemble them. Pollock painted with his canvas spread upon the floor, and Dein spread his cardboard pieces before the canvas in homage. ('It's so much bigger than the jigsaw puzzle version,' he says to his microphone, sounding somewhat daunted.) It took him seven hours and forty-six minutes to assemble the puzzle, with a little transatlantic advice and moral support over the phone from expert dissectologist Tom Tyler in Ipswich.

My assembling of this puzzle took far longer than seven hours and forty-six minutes. I think it must have been easier to do it in front of the Real Thing. The image on the puzzle box was not very helpful, as it was not complete, and I kept getting it upside down. This wouldn't have happened to me in Buffalo.

Reproducing the free swirl and squirt and drip of rich oil in little dry hard discrete cardboard pieces is a paradoxical activity, but very satisfying. Why? I keep looking for the answer.

I don't know whether Springbok's innovative approach to puzzles was the real starting point for the great leap forward in the international trade in dissected Old Masters. The story of the spectacular rise of the museum shop has not yet been told. I love museum shops, although I slightly despise myself for doing so, and chide myself for the need to appropriate bits and pieces of culture instead of relying on the purity of unaided memory. I indulge my weakness by buying Christmas presents for grandchildren in the British Museum and the Tate and the Science Museum. I'd just visited the National Gallery shop and was having a pre-Christmas lunch with my brother and my sister Helen in a wine bar off Trafalgar Square, loaded with parcels, when the idea for writing a book about jigsaws began to take shape. I remember telling them about it. I thought my little book would make the perfect stocking-filler. It would surely be as desirable as a Van Gogh calendar or a fake Sumerian necklace or a cardboard build-your-own dinosaur.

Our need to buy souvenirs and replicas has been profitable to traders for thousands of years. St Paul railed at the silversmiths of Ephesus for turning out little silver replicas of the Temple of Diana, but Christians were not deterred from longing for their own little idols. Relics of saints succeeded little silver temples, and pilgrims, crusaders, curious travellers and rival ecclesiastical institutions purchased the bones and teeth and hair of saints, fragments of the True Cross, scraps from Jacob's coat, and walking sticks made from the rod of Moses. The Holy Vase or Grail was the source of many a legend and fabrication. Canterbury, as Chaucer told us, was a manufactory of sacred objects for commercial purposes, as were all places of artistic and religious pilgrimage. Calvin complained in his Treatise on Relics that there were so many bits of the True Cross scattered around the abbeys of Christendom that if they were gathered together they would make a great shipload, far too heavy for even Jesus to have carried. Mary Magdalen left at least five corpses, but, as her devotees protested, all things were possible to God.

The story of the True Cross is one of the more incomprehensible and incoherent legends of the Middle Ages. It comes from a compilation of saints' lives and ecclesiastical commentary by Jacopo Voragine titled
The Golden Legend,
or the
Legenda Aurea,
which was once immensely popular; it was Caxton's best-selling title. (The story of the Holy Grail, in comparison, is straightforward.) The legend of the True Cross is most famously depicted in the murals of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, in which we see Seth placing in the mouth of the dead Adam a twig from the tree of Good and Evil, which becomes the wood of the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Further images show the meeting, centuries later, of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, as she kneels and prays on a bridge made of the wood; the Dream of Constantine presaging victory in battle; a miracle in which the cross restores a youth to life; the recapture of the cross from the Persians by the Greek emperor Heraclius; and other related or possibly unrelated scenes. I am indebted for this précis (but not for any errors in it) to Helen Langdon's account in her 1984 guide to Italy,
where she describes the frescoes as 'hauntingly still and grave', their beauty 'dependent on the masterly arrangement of geometric shapes and cool tones ... and on the dramatic power of expression and gesture'. Piero della Francesco's murals are of great dignity, unlike the medieval tourist trade, which thrived on fragments and splinters, but you may purchase them, of course, in irresistible postcard format. And you can buy his
Madonna del Duca da Montefeltro
as a jigsaw.

We love replicas, and replicas of replicas, and we did so long before Jean Baudrillard came up with his theories of a simulacrum society. We like to take something home with us, to prove we have been there, to remind us of what we saw, to keep us in touch with the spirit of the place. We know they are not authentic, but we don't care. Historian Tom Holland writes in
The Author
(Summer 2007) that he treats himself to some antiquities to accompany each work on which he embarks: coins issued by Julius Caesar for research on the Roman Republic, a crusader's ring for the Middle Ages. But, his means being limited, he has also acquired a supplement of tat.

Mostly, this consists of trinkets that have been flogged to me over the years outside a wide variety of archaeological sites. In fact, I like knowing they are wholly without value: it makes me less nervous about re-arranging them ... Among the treasures currently on display are a plastic Caesar bought from a rip-off merchant outside the Roman Forum; a fridge-magnet in the form of a Viking from Uppsala; and a statue of Artemis from Ephesus.

He follows in an old tradition. Wealthy tourists taking the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century purchased real antiquities and commissioned original paintings and casts, but they also set in
motion a vogue for miniature and easily transported copies of famous sights and objects. From the eighteenth century onwards the Piazza di Spagna in Rome was surrounded by the workshops and studios of artists and craftsmen and mosaicists, making snuffboxes, jewellery and other 'collectibles' for the tourist trade. As an Italian historian commented, 'Ladies now wear in tiny finger-rings the largest monuments of ancient and Christian Rome.'You could buy brooches decorated with St Peter's or the Coliseum, or a fan showing the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or a ring displaying the Temple of Vespasian, or a perfume bottle of green lava adorned with micromosaic views of ruins and doves.

Goethe in his
Italian Journey
recorded his dislike of the degradation of classical art into 'snuffboxes and bracelets', but the fashion had caught on and continues to flourish. (Goethe's taste in knickknacks was not impeccable: in 1793 he tried to persuade his mother to buy a toy guillotine for his son August, but the wise woman robustly refused.) As with little pretty pocket books, the miniaturization is part of the attraction. Edith Wharton, whose wealthy American parents did the Grand Tour in the 1840s (and happened to run into a revolution in Paris in 1848) were avid collectors of bric-a-brac, mercilessly described by their daughter. In Wharton's short story, 'The Old Maid', she evokes the rosewood whatnots adorned with tropical shells, with 'feldspar vases, an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum'.

Goethe was seriously and scientifically interested in stones and mineralogy, and on his travels could not resist collecting as he went. Edith Wharton's parents, the Joneses, were more like magpies. Mark Twain was a magpie
malgré lui
; he didn't mean to buy the stuff, but he did. The marketing and the ubiquity of souvenirs overwhelmed his better judgement. In Switzerland he
resisted the
Lion of Lucerne
rendered in wood, ivory, ebony, marble, chalk, sugar or chocolate, and grew very tired of looking at wooden quails, chickens and chamois, but he succumbed to buying three wooden clocks, which he thought would be 'pretty enough, no doubt, when I get them home'. This was despite his long-held aversion to the inane, silly and aggravating cuckoo clock. The merchandise was too much for him.

Even Wordsworth, that touchstone of the authentic, was intrigued and half attracted by souvenirs and mechanical toys, by 'imitations fondly made in plain Confession of Man's weakness, and his loves'. He was not above taking note of models of the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh Castle and microscopic views of Rome and Tivoli and the Temple of Sibyl. He saw the parts as parts, but with a feeling of the whole. (That's his own phrase, from
The Prelude
.) He condoned our weaknesses.

Amongst Auntie Phyl's jumble of jewellery and curios are an inch-long Eiffel Tower on a chain and a tiny tortoiseshell book the size of my thumbnail. It's not really a book, and it's probably not really made of tortoiseshell, but it has a spine, and a metal clasp, and into it is set a tiny spyhole not much larger than a pinhead. If you look through this little spyhole, you can see, astonishingly, a large view of the Marine Parade of Margate, complete with Edwardian ladies in hats walking along the promenade. How did they get in there? I never saw this object or this view when I was a child, and maybe Auntie Phyl never knew they were there. Perhaps the little book had belonged to Grandma Bloor. It is sheer chance that I noticed the spyhole, and put it to my eye. The ladies had walked unseen for a century in their hermetic seaside kingdom before I saw them.

I wonder if it was purchased as a souvenir of an outing to Margate. Mablethorpe, not Margate, was the favoured resort of the East Midlands, but I suppose my grandparents could have ventured
to Margate. They loved touring with their motorbike and sidecar, and they purchased hundreds of postcards to mark their travels through the Lakes and the West Country. They kept them in a large tin toffee box from Doncaster, which accompanied my aunt to the care home in Newark, and is now in the custody of my sister Helen.

Postcard views were, and remain, the cheapest form of memento, and old postcards now have dedicated collectors. Large art jigsaws are more expensive, but the jigsaw has been reinvented as a postcard, and is on sale in this format in many museum shops. You can buy greetings-card-sized jigsaws of Michelangelo and Van Gogh in galleries throughout Europe. In the shop of the Gilbert Collection in Somerset House in London, you can buy a little 'Post-Puzzle' of the collection's famous micromosaic tigress, complete with an envelope for posting, or more elaborate and expensive, wooden, seventy-five-piece jigsaws of the micromosaic 'Ponte Rotto and Tiber Island' or of the design on a Florentine
pietra dura
table top. As micromosaics and
pietra dura
tables are in themselves a kind of jigsaw, involving the fitting of small pieces together to make a larger image, we have here the manufacture of jigsaws of jigsaws. Sir Arthur Gilbert and his wife Rosalinde, the founders of this idiosyncratic collection, were very keen on dissections and resections, on patterns and shapes. The Lewins had jigsaw eyes, and the Gilberts had mosaic eyes.

Charles Saumarez Smith, in an essay on 'The Future of the Museum' (A
Companion to Museum Studies,
2006), points out that 'shops are becoming more like museums – places for visual and aesthetic display – while museums are becoming more like shops ... as shops become more creative, more historical, and more aesthetically suggestive, museums are driven by their financial circumstances to become more aggressively commercial.' It is claimed that more people visit the shop of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York than visit the museum itself. Some gallery shops now sell specially commissioned objects, published by a gallery imprint. The Tate, which in the 1960s enjoyed everincreasing sales of postcards (particularly of Salvador Dali, always the people's choice), established a new gallery shop in 1972, and in 1995 a new company called Tate Gallery Publishing was set up, owned by Trustees, with the profits covenanted to the gallery. The Science Museum recently opened a retail outlet in Selfridges. Nick Prior, in an essay on 'Postmodern Restructurings'
(A Companion to Museum Studies,
2006), notes that whereas 'Once upon a time, the stands at museum shops sold postcards and posters, a few books and some table mats', now 'merchandise covers everything from film, opera and poetry to fashionable clothes, catalogues and kitchenware'. He doesn't mention jigsaws, but he could have done.

I once bought a really disappointing jigsaw in a National Trust shop, I think at Stourhead. It's one of the very few I've never finished, and I failed to finish it not because it was too difficult, but because it was too dull. It represented, as I remember, an eighteenth-century painting of some prize specimen of livestock – a large cow, or perhaps a bull, of an ancient breed, with small legs and a large square bulk of body. I thought it would be fun to do, and even mildly educational, but it wasn't. After wasting some time on its enormous flank, I gave up. It was not interesting enough to finish.