I have a pet theory that it was something Lina picked up on their honeymoon that would have been valuable enough to have solved all their troubles, but was overlooked.
I like that. I kept thinking she may have had something of value which she could've offered to get them out of their immediate predicament, but I doubted that it would've kept Johnnie from getting into more trouble ;)
Some things I found on this subject....
The detective is trying to make sense of the picture, as detectives are tasked with trying to make sense of things in any given case. The picture could also be seen as a representation of Lina's frazzled state of mind.http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/15917/what-is-the-significan ce-of-the-abstract-painting
I did a search on Google Books
http://books.google.com/bkshp?hl=en&tab=pp using "alfred hitchcock" "suspicion" "painting" and found this. It's wordy and admittedly doesn't have the answer, but has some interesting thoughts. The author may or may not have come to a definitive conclusion later in the book....
Aesthetic Space in Hitchcock - by Brigitte Peucker
Films, Stephen Heath famously reminds us, "take place" -- they establish scenographic space and their spectator "completes the image as its subject." Situated at the center of the perspectival system that underpins narrative film, the spectator is "placed" in relation to its images. With Hitchcock's
Suspicion (1941) as his example, Heath notes that the portrait that anchors the film's narrative -- the portrait of Cedric Hardwicke's General McLaidlaw (a speaking name if ever there was one) -- establishes the scenographic space of Hitchcock's film as perspectival, the Quattrocentro view. But at the fringes of this film's discourse, Heath suggests, is another kind of space. It is intimate when a look cast by a character offers a glimpse of a different visual organization.
As it happens, this character is Benson (Vernon Downing), a detective, and the object of his look is astonishing, perhaps even shocking, to him. It is a still life in the Cubist manner -- a copy of Pablo Picasso's "Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit" (1931) -- and its notion of space is in marked contradistinction to that of the McLaidlaw portrait. If the still life's transgression against the portrait's perspectival system is a joke in this film, writes Heath, then it is a telling one. While the detective's glance at the painting is irrelevant to the film's narrative, Heath argues, it nevertheless serves "to demonstrate the rectitude of the portrait, the true painting at the centre of the scene, utterly in frame in the film's action."
But the scene in question takes place in the home of McLaidlaw's daughter, Lina, and her husband, Johnnie Aysgarth, and the general's portrait is
not at its center, even figuratively. It doesn't grace the mantle, as it had in the McLaidlaw residence: indeed, it's on the floor, propped up against a wall, askew, dethroned. A modern landscape painting hangs over the Aysgarth fireplace in its stead, while the copy of the Picasso hangs in the foyer. True, this landscape doesn't flaunt the rules of perspective, but neither is McLaidlaw's paternal gaze centrally positioned in this space. After the detectives leave, Lina returns to address her father's portrait, denying that anything untoward has happened. But at this moment, two dark lines of shadow -- at a diagonal -- are visible across the paternal portrait, undermining its unity, its coherence.
My question, therefore, is this: What if the joke here were of a another kind -- one whose point were not to confirm the "proper" rendering of the McLaidlaw portrait but rather to affirm the
tear that the Picasso-esque still life promotes in the scenographic space of classical cinema? What if the multiple perspectives that coexist in Cubist space -- the painting's rupture of the film's aesthetic illusion, in other words -- were the point instead? Or what if the spectator's (here Benson's) puzzlement at the painting that forecloses continuity between his diegetic world and the work of art were the issue? .........
A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, First Edition. Edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague. 2011 Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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