Bee and Bresson: Pickpocket and its Painting

Susan Bee’s painting “Pickpocket” (2013), like many of her paintings – there are five in the “Pickpocket” series alone – is based on a film still. In this case the image from which the work is drawn is Robert Bresson’s film by that same name, Pickpocket. The relationship between the source image and Bee’s painting is part of the painting’s mystique. Her work, here as elsewhere, brings into question the relationship between photographic image (a single frame), cinematic image (that image as part of a stream of moving images), and painted image (the hand, the brush, and oil paint rendering both the still and the moving). A powerful image to which the artist is clearly attracted – Bee’s painting are rarely pastiches or send-ups – undergoes a transformation. By way of her mind in its conception, her hand in its execution, and the properties of oil paint, the image becomes other than what it was. Unrealised possibilities in the original are explored. “Explored” may mean invented.

The image in Bee’s painting is of a woman and a man – woman in the foreground, man in the background – separated from one another by a set of bars, against which they both lean. Each one’s visible eye is closed, the other eye obscured by the opposite body but understood to be closed too. Each figure’s hands grip the bars in their own distinctive fashion (“She’s giving; he’s desperate” painter Simon Carr quips while viewing the work).

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes reminded us of the useful distinction between punctum and studium: between the impact of the image on a viewer’s perception of the work all by itself, and the study of the context of the image, broadening our understanding of it. Punctum: without ever having seen Bresson’s film or knowing anything about that film’s narrative, Bee’s painting tells us something about human separation, but also about how close the two figures are to drawing together, despite that separation. Drawn from the very end of the film, the image occurs at the moment the two protagonists do find one another along a very strange path.

Susan Bee is a painter of great distinction. Born in 1952, her work spans several phases, from abstraction, through Chagall inspired cornucopias, to other wild celebrations of life and colour, to such paintings of film stills as this one, to name just a few of the periods. In his catalogue essay “Capitals of Pain and Love: Susan Bee’s Recent Work” in Eye of the Storm: Selected Works 1981-2023 (2024) Raphael Rubinstein writes: “again and again in Susan Bee’s recent paintings we are shown figures who have been caught, enclosed, imprisoned or hemmed in, men and women with no avenue of escape from the circumstances (visual, narrative, psychological, historical) that surround them.”¹ This characterisation of Bee’s concerns certainly applies to “Pickpocket”.

Susan Bee

Robert Bresson was of course a legendary French filmmaker, admired for the austerity of his style and the force of his spiritual vision. His rejection of acting as a mode of expressivity that was native to theatre but an imposition on cinema led him to refer to his performers as models, not actors; clearly the two figures in the still from Pickpocket are models for Bee. Bresson’s film, made in 1959, is in black and white; Bee’s painting sports a wild palette of colours, starting from the green of the female figure’s dress to the honeyed colour of her hair. The bars of the holding cell in which the male figure is confined here become a grid of orange, blue and other coloured geometric forms and abstractions that may be holding her, or him, or both. (Another painting in Bee’s “Pickpocket” series is called “Gridlock”. In Bee there is always a grid, often sublated. Could one also speak of “Gridlock”, as when traffic in a city ceases to move, impeded by other traffic, containing everyone in an enforced immobility? To stop the forward movement of the film and freeze on a single image as a form of gridlock?)

Studium: Bresson’s film is about liberty and confinement. The male protagonist, alienated and poor, imagines himself beyond good and evil, like many young men before him. He hones his skills as he aspires to be a master pickpocket, without any other concern but the art of the theft – which ultimately leads him to an existential and carceral impasse. The female protagonist, poor and suffering, has undergone one betrayal after another in life, always with an eye out and a care for the male protagonist once she meets him. He cannot see she cares, so involved is he in his theories and his thieving. In the final images of the film the light falls on the female protagonist and the male protagonist has a spiritual awakening that life is with the others and specifically with her, something she had been aware of long before. The prison bars that separate them are real and now, also, nothing. It is also true that Bresson started off wanting to be a painter. In his Notes On The Cinematograph Bresson writes: “Have a painter’s eye. The painter creates by looking.”²

In terms of studium as well as punctum, Susan Bee’s rendering of the bars in Bresson’s original bears examination. They provide a grid, as was mentioned. From between the bars are released the powerful forces of abstraction and the dazzling light of epiphany. Bright oranges, greens, and blues pulsate where before there had only been darkness. The triangles suggest an arrangement of three, of which the male and female protagonists are the two visible points, while the third is invisible. In mosaic, the tiles are all squares, so this is not a painting of a mosaic per se. But the disparate geometric forms all do fit together as with a mosaic, with compositional action both inside each individual square or triangle and compositional relations between them. 

A possible etymology of ‘mosaic’ is Moses. This may refer to the moments after Moses returns from Sinai with the first set of tablets and sees the tribe dancing around the Golden Calf. In anger Moses smashes the tablets on the ground and then, in all humbleness and regret, on hands and knees, he attempts to piece together the broken fragments back into the whole of the law – which is what the assemblage of a mosaic might be. There is something similarly broken and reassembled in Bee’s bars and grid. As such Bresson’s austere Jansenist Catholicism merges with mosaic assemblage in Bee’s tragic optimism, grounded in brokenness and yet open to all of possibility, expectant of plural modalities as fused in the image. Bresson writes in Notes On The Cinematograph: “Religious subjects receive their dignity and their elevation from the images and the sounds. Not (as people believe) the other way about: the image and sounds receive from the religious subjects…”.³ This is certainly true of Bee’s “Pickpocket”.

Bee parts from Bresson on the question of abstraction; Bresson’s search for the soul sees no gain in that. Meanwhile Raphael Rubenstein writes about the abstraction in Bee’s work: “This doesn’t mean, however, that Bee seeks only to provide abstract equivalents for the inner states of her protagonists. Although she certainly invites us to connect the figurative and abstract parts of each painting, and ultimately to absorb them as a single experience, it is also true that the non-figurative areas take on a life of their own… In some cases, the abstract patterns are not restricted to the background but also migrate onto the figures’ clothing”.⁴ This is certainly true of the female protagonist’s green dress, lightly barred in yellow, in “Pickpocket”, as well as the whole drama of mosaic and shape.

Susan Bee, Pow!, 2014, Oil, enamel, and sand on canvas

In Bresson’s film melodrama is avoided by way of intimation and silence. The female protagonist, almost angelically, provides the illumination that transforms the man from a suicidal, incarcerated consciousness without a conscience into an individual that realises that life is with the others, the soul limited but beautiful. I asked Bee how she felt about the oft-slotted role for the woman as agent of salvation, at least since Boethius’s Dame Philosophy in The Consolations of Philosophy, but surely older than that, and very powerfully so in Christianity. Bee said she was fine with that role when it crops up among other forms of feminine agency; certainly, in the film the transformative power of the woman’s bearing is both palpable and plausible. Thus Bee’s feminism is flexible enough to embrace multiple forms of female power, from the redemptive to the feisty in other of her works. Even as Bresson’s film is primarily about Michel, the male protagonist, and his story, Bee’s “Pickpocket” (and the series as a whole) turns the image in the direction of Jeanne, the female protagonist. At the same time, as Johanna Drucker points out in Eye of the Storm: Selected Works 1981-2023, “Couples and their dramas reoccur in Bee’s work”.⁵

In 1985 I interviewed Robert Bresson in Paris, in his apartment on the Ile de St Louis. (That interview was later published as an essay in Third Rail, an L.A. arts journal of the period.) What impressed and frightened me as a kid back then who was deeply in love with Bresson’s films was the ever-narrowing intensity of his vision. Bresson told me that Tarkovsky had visited the previous week, but that his images were “flat”; Bresson was no pluralist of aesthetic vision. His mode was the right mode. What impresses me about Bee is precisely her pluralism, which is to say, her ability to respect and at the same time build from Bresson’s transcendental logic into other dimensions of illumination and light. As Bresson himself writes in Notes On The Cinematograph, “Mark out clearly the limits with which you seek to let yourself be surprised by your model. Infinite surprises within a finite frame.”⁶

Endnotes