Other people’s obsessions present a paradox. We all have fixations, but everyone knows someone whose super-sized preoccupation leaves you thinking, “That is way too otherworldly, bizarre, freaky, annoying, shameful, silly … and maybe, not even human.”
Berkeley-based artist and food writer L. John Harris’ newest book, Portrait in Red (Heyday Books, $35) serves as rejoinder to such obsession repression. During a three-week assignment during which he was charged with evaluating the iconic Parisian ham-and-cheese-with-béchamel-sauce sandwich known as croque monsieur by an online food magazine in 2015, he stumbled upon an abandoned painting.
The artwork was a portrait of a young girl, her head wrapped in a red cloth, her upper body outlined in thick black strokes but void of detail and color, other than the underlying camel brown canvas. Her lips bore the same vivid red as her headscarf; white paint added depth to her face and defined her eyes, which gazed directly at the viewer. There was no artist’s signature anywhere, only a date in the upper right-hand corner: January 12, 1935. The painting had an unfinished look Harris found appealing and the mystery of how it came to be sitting amid other clutter on a sidewalk tickled his curiosity.
With some guilt, he decided to take the artwork back to the friend’s flat where he is staying. He planned to ask around, pin up posters inviting anyone who knows its owner to contact him, and so on. Unbeknownst to him on that day, Harris was about to embark on a years-long quest in search of the painting’s origins and creator.
This book is no one-track treadmill about a piece of art. Harris is an incurable detective with boundless curiosity in many categories—food, art, music, philosophy, psychology, world history, past and contemporary culture, literature, architecture, fashion. Berkeley’s avant-garde and bohemian environment from the 1960s to the current day, Los Angeles and San Francisco art scenes, and other environs enter Portrait in Red‘s frame.
Here too are Harris’ fun amateur photos of various people posed in different settings with his beloved portrait, intermingled with images of artwork by the likes of Klimt, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, da Vinci, and others. The images become one of the book’s more intriguing, essential features.
As Harris dives deeper into the portrait and its historical context—tormenting himself about transporting it at one point; about selecting a frame at another—emotional and psychological themes weave in and out of the narrative. It becomes a memoir-like rendering, but also a peculiar kind of mental travelogue. That journey isn’t so much about reaching a destination as it is about being engaged in a search for self and connection to the world that has no real final resting place or sense of coming home.
Harris does his best work when writing less repetitively and introspectively about himself and instead, focusing on food and art. His takedowns of people—from intimate friends to strangers—and the triumphs and traumas of the Parisian café sandwich and other food are biting (excuse the pun) or jubilant or simply appreciably factual.
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Other highlights come in a section on a friend’s unusual optical condition, pareidolia, which causes her to see faces, animals, angels, and more in abstract patterns found in nature. In another fascinating section, he writes about the young girl’s headwrap and segues into an examination of the color red in art history—serving up some of the book’s finest passages. A late chapter addresses the cognitive rewards of viewing art and the neurological mapping of art appreciation is illuminating. More of this direction and less ruminating about his need for approval as an artist and writer from others would have made Portrait stronger.
A final comment about the book comes with a spoiler alert. Harris ends the book still in search of the painting’s owner and origins. Teetering on giving up at more than one point during his seven-year search, he closes the epilogue with three words: “The journey continues.” When it comes to obsessions, be they weird, wonderful, or worrisome, they are decidedly human and here to stay.
Buy Portrait in Red here.
