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The quest to uncover the history of a mysterious painting, and a joyous exploration of art in the twentieth century and beyond.
While wandering the streets of Paris in 2015, L. John Harris finds an abandoned, unfinished, and strangely compelling painting. The subject: a girl wearing a bright-red head covering, fixing her viewer with a foreboding gaze. The painting bears no signature, only the date: January 12, 1935. Harris, a journalist and illustrator, embarks on a multi-year quest to uncover the story behind this painting. His sleuthing has given birth to Portrait in Red, a wide-ranging exploration of art and its enduring mysteries.
With wit and a contagious enthusiasm, Harris traces unexpected connections between Paris on the eve of World War II, his bohemian life in the San Francisco Bay Area, the aura of original paintings, the magic of found objects, and the aesthetics of a perfect croque monsieur. Portrait in Red will delight lovers of Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes or Michael Finkel's The Art Thief. By turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, it is an existential detective story, set among world tragedies, art-historical epiphanies, and comic hijinks.
Praise for Portrait in Red:
"At once a detective story, a Parisian culinary travel memoir, and a chain of ruminations on serendipity and the nature and power of art, especially anonymous art." —Kirkus Reviews
"Portrait in Red is about how a stranger's trash became an inquisitive writer's treasure—a free-wheeling, fascinating dissertation on a found object with infinite worth." —Foreword
"Harris is an incurable detective with boundless curiosity [...] 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." —Lou Fancher, 48 Hills
"A gem of a book—a journey of discovery that reveals much about art's power to seduce us, and even more about the author's passion for it." —Terrance Gelenter, host of Your American Friend in Paris
"Portrait in Red is a rich global tapestry that is inviting, inventive, and lively." —W. Scott Haine, author of The History of France
"An amusing and authentic story of a beautiful and mysterious painting." —Serge Sorokko, Serge Sorokko Gallery, San Francisco
"In Portrait in Red, L. John Harris takes on the role of a Paris flâneur who comments on all he sees, hears, feels, and tastes. Harris's expert eye and palette tease out the nuances of life on the streets of the French capital." —Zack Rogow, coauthor of Colette Uncensored
"Local color, endearing ruminations, and Harris's obsessive love for the City of Light shine through in these pages. C’est formidable!" —David Downie, author of A Taste of Paris
"I am absolutely besotted with Portrait in Red by L. John Harris, his journey in search of the story behind an anonymous and abandoned portrait found in Paris. The form and the content—the size, the texture of the cover, the paper, the font, the images, the prose, the knowledge, the voice—this is all together the cutting edge of memoir, a hybrid, blending personal essay, novel and memoir. The author’s insights on literary and artistic works, his knowledge of critical theory, the personal revelations that endear him to the reader, the laughs, the sensual delights of his descriptions of food and drink, and the through-line of the detective novel turned on its head, all gave me many hours of delight." —Tristine Rainer, author of Apprenticed to Venus: My Years with Anaïs Nin
"Very well done, in the mode of investigative art reporting à la Ren Weschler. I don't see many books of this kind." —James Elkins, author of What Painting Is
L. John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley's food revolution in the 1970s, Harris worked at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic (1974). He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his "Foodoodles" cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019) and My Little Plague Journal (2022). Mr. Harris coproduced with PBS in 2001 the film Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar and serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Harris's next book is a history of Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto," to be published by Heyday.
Prologue
I
The Journey Begins
A Corner Table
First Croque
Not the Mona Lisa
The Girl’s Aura
The Red and the Black
Meet Aura’s Cousin, Patina
The Red and the Gold
Heureux Hasard
From Russia With Art & Soul
Not So Heureux Hasard
On a Roll
Return To the Scene of the Crime
A Red Letter Day
Abandoned, Anonymous and Unfinished
Gleaning 101
Framing The Girl in Black and Gold
The Vernissage
A Christmas Salon Chez Robert
Finish the Unfinished—a Contest
Paris, January 12, 1935
The Girl From Paris Meets the Boys From Brazil
Non Finito Redux
II
The Journey Continues
Back To Paris With a Poster and a Plan
The Gods Must Be Surreal
Unlikely Complicities
Posting The Girl
Meetup With Picasso and Balzac
Tending To My Attachments
Rue Visconti, Bonnard and More Balzac
First Contact
Poster in the Poubelle
Ritual Croques
Dashed Hopes and Mini-Croques
My Mona Lisa
String Theory In London
The École des Beaux-Arts Says Non
Full Circle At La Palette
Web Design and Poster Control
At the End Of the Day
III
The Journey Ends
Jean Dubuffet’s Swan Song
But a Painting Is a Painting
A Whodunit With Two Whos
The End Of the Story?
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Sources
Illustration Credits
About the Author