An Object of Beauty: A Novel

by STEVE MARTIN

  “My grandmother will die soon. She will die.”

  I said nothing. It seemed to me that she was speaking to herself.

  “So beautiful. When she was eighteen, he made paintings of her. He painted her like she was; I’m sure of it. I think I look like her.”

  She turned on her side again, toward me, and put her hand on my stomach. She began to rub me, lifting my shirt, touching my flesh. She would lower her hand across my jeans, gliding around, moving back up to my stomach. Each visit to my penis got a little longer, but it was absentminded motion, and my dick got absentmindedly hard. She treated it like a curiosity that was third or fourth on her to-do list. I was glad when she just as casually stopped, which meant I had no decisions to make. Then she turned toward the window, and for the next thirty minutes she either slept or dreamed.

  It had been two hours since she’d ingested the drug, and she was beginning to stir. She sat partially up, opening her eyes and looking around, as if trying to determine where she was. She looked at me, hugged my arm again, said, “I’m sorry you didn’t take any.” She got up and found her legs, stretching long, the high starting to recede and the drug’s amphetamine base starting to take over. She opened the refrigerator, poured from a pitcher of ice water, and drank it down, pausing between gulps as if it were a hard Scotch.

  She sliced some fruit onto a plate. We sat at the small kitchen table. “Daniel, I have money now.”

  I thought she would stop talking if I seemed too interested, so I tempered everything I said. “Because of today?”

  “Yes. Today.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I can’t see the wrong in it.”

  “In what?”

  “The Parrish print. A couple of years ago I visited my grandmother, who was very sick. Remember? I told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve worked at Sotheby’s for years; I’ve seen a million pictures. I’m used to looking at things close, trying not to be tricked. I went into my grandmother’s room, we spoke a bit, and I took the Parrish print over for her to look at. It was a sunny day. If not, I might have missed the whole thing. I took the print back to put it on the wall. I used my coat to clean dust from the glass. But something wasn’t right with the print.”

  “How?”

  “The surface was odd. There were textural changes. The surface of a Parrish print would be uniform, except for the blacks. The prints were extremely well done, very easy to distinguish copies from the real thing, because their surface is so remarkable. I went into an empty bedroom and closed the door. The frame hadn’t been touched in decades. There were rusted metal points holding in the glass, pressing against a wooden back. I got a nail file and moved them aside. I turned the frame upside down on the bed, and the picture and glass fell out. I took away the wooden back and saw another panel, with an old sticker on the back, ‘Maxfield Parrish Studio.’ I picked it up, expecting the print to be underneath. It wasn’t. I turned over the board, and there was the image. Maybe they glued the print to the studio board. I looked; I looked closely. I looked at the edges. There was no paper trim. No, they hadn’t. I looked at the surface. This was not a print. It was a painting. Parrish had given my grandmother the painting of herself. She had assumed it was a print.”

  “How could she not know it was a painting?”

  “Parrish used his own framer. And his prints were often framed close in like paintings. He must have given it to her framed, and she assumed it was a print. She had said he gave it to her in his studio and there was a stack of prints nearby. We’ve always assumed it was a print because that’s what she told us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I reassembled it and put it back on the wall. And I didn’t tell my grandmother or my mother.”

  “And today?”

  “I thought about the painting, how valuable it was. Circumstances got worse for me. I could not fail. I could not be driven out of New York by a simple lack of money. And my taste was improving. I needed better things.

  “I went to New Hampshire where Parrish lived and found a dealer. I told him the print I wanted, and a few months later, he found one and I bought it. It was the print of the painting. I paid two hundred fifty dollars for it. The image had advertising around it, for Fisk Tires, but otherwise the image was the same size as the painting. I trimmed away the margins that included the advertising. I went to a framer and had them glue the print to an antique artist’s board. My next trip to Atlanta, I took out the painting and replaced it with the print. It was an incredible match. The Parrish print surfaces are remarkable, exactly like his paintings. I wrapped it in a towel and put it in my suitcase.

  “I put it at auction through a lawyer.”

  “And me?”

  “I knew there was a bidder hot for the piece. He was going to leave a maximum bid, but I didn’t know what that bid would be until just before the sale. I wasn’t going to let him get it for four hundred thousand if I knew he would go to six hundred. Just before the sale, I made sure I glimpsed the auctioneer’s cheat sheet, and beside the lot number for the Parrish was written, 600k. So I had you stop bidding at five eighty. There was no bidder on the phone; it was a Sotheby’s rep, bidding for the absent client.”

  I was a beginning art writer, just starting to make my way in New York, and now I was a participant in a newsworthy fraud.

  “You will never tell.”

  “No,” I said, “I will never tell.”

  58.

  IF YOU EVER get lost heading for Chelsea, use your X-ray vision to find a truck bearing hundreds of gallons of white paint; it will lead you to where you want to go. White became the default color for modern gallery walls as early as the 1920s, when Bauhaus rigor dictated it. White feigned neutrality, but it was loaded with meaning. It was the severe reaction to Victorian darkness, to the painted walls of Art Nouveau and the elegant wood panels of Art Deco. A painting looked good against it: there was only it to look at.

  Even older pictures took on an air of modernity when surrounded with white paint. Chelsea was awash in it, and so were collectors’ homes and museums. The only things that didn’t look good against it were people. Light was coming from everywhere, windows, ceilings, and walls, illuminating every makeup smear, skin flaw, and case of thinning hair, no matter what efforts were made to disguise them. Collectors’ homes, now high-ceilinged, spare, rugless, and chromed, became echo chambers.

  The theoretically ideal space for showing pictures was deemed a windowless white cube, an idea that was cumulative rather than birthed, and a gallery called White Cube opened in London in 1993, further solidifying the concept. Frames were dispensed with, as much for reasons of economy as taste.

  Lacey’s new gallery, drenched in white though not quite a cube, was located on the north side of 22nd Street, between the ultracool 303 Gallery and the architecturally oriented Max Protetch Gallery. Her gallery was flooded with sunlight, and only the gray concrete floors diluted the glare. When Lacey wore yellow, which meant that she was blond from head to toe, she stood out against the bleached walls like the Sun King.

  But during the few months it took to relocate, there was a slow desertion of Lacey’s friends and acquaintances. Hinton Alberg never visited the gallery because of Cornelia’s disapproval of the way Lacey had treated Patrice Claire, whose life went on fine without her, though he still felt shivers at the mention of her name. Pilot Mouse had been collected by celebrities and major dealers and didn’t need Chelsea or Lacey. He had delivered on his promise to get her two paintings to sell, but his new girlfriend made sure he stayed away from her. Carey Harden was never given another show and resented her for it, and he spread around the art world a weak, self-serving ill-will toward Lacey and her gallery. Sharon, her formerly impetuous cohort, had gotten married and settled into life with her new baby, and Angela had moved out of state to work as a writer’s assistant.

  After my breakdown with Tanya Ross, I, too, bore a grudge against Lacey, and it kept me at an angry
distance from her. I hoped that Tanya might view my rejection of Lacey, if she ever heard about it, as remorse, and the memory of our romance might settle on top of and obliterate the stink of the nasty event at Sotheby’s that had taken place now seven years ago. But I also knew she would always think of me as a crook, something that was beyond her nature to forget.

  I had tried to repair my relationship with her, but my calls were not returned, and intermediaries I enlisted did not succeed in even framing a tea time with her. Eventually, I heard she was taking dates with a financier, which made me ill. I wanted to write her a letter explaining that a financier was more likely to engage in misadventure than an art writer, but wisely, I didn’t. I could not imagine that Tanya was any less sad than I was; we had both said I love you—something neither of us would have said frivolously. We had moved easily as a couple through the art world waters. I found her attractive; I felt she reflected my own good taste in a mate. But I knew now that I would never reflect her own good taste in a mate, even though the case against Lacey and me was never pursued. I was now cast down with the sleazeball hustlers who inhabit the back alleys of the art world, whom the legitimate folk can smell coming.

  I had heard that Agent Parks was a gallery visitor who was allowed inside Lacey’s inner sanctum office at odd hours. And it could only be ironic that I had turned down requests to review Lacey’s shows in ARTnews because of my “integrity.”

  The missing people in her life, however, were replaced by an influx of new collectors and personalities, raging, competing, socializing. There were dinners and openings, invitations to fund-raisers, and a fluctuating, dynamic mix of people that transformed her impetuous youthful charm into professional adult ease. Lacey poured her profits back into the business, taking out full-page ads in art magazines, funding promotions, delivering guarantees to her hot artists, and financing better-than-average catalogs for her shows. She was living well, if only breaking even, and her gallery, it appeared, was prospering.

  59.

  IT IS EASY to think that the hot young art stars who were dwarfing prices for old masters at auction were newborn arrivals reaping the rewards of fashion. But most of the celebrated artists only looked like new arrivals. Koons, Hirst, and Gober had all been working since the eighties. Basquiat was achieving sensational prices but at least had the courtesy to be dead. Warhol led the pack, though it was unlikely he would ever have been in a footrace.

  Arab money. Asian money. Russian money. The auction houses were seeing most of it, but there was a nice trickle-down from Wall Street collectors, who heard about their clients’ investments in art and decided to get in on the action by frequenting Chelsea. Artists flooded Manhattan, then all the boroughs of New York City, and it became inexplicable why one artist would be swept up by a dealer while others of apparently equal talent would be ignored.

  But what could be a better mix than action and aesthetics? Everyone was alive. Each auction price was tallied and measured. Art reviews were either neutral or unfathomable. Collectors pretended to care about criticism, and artists pretended not to care about success, making them interlock like Velcro. Fund-raisers tripled, and MoMA, Dia, the Hammer, and the Guggenheim had benefactors lined up to get in. If you think this description is negative, I will remind you and myself of the particular ether that pervaded the contemporary art world’s reach: vitality. This secular renaissance, this abundant artistic output, made news. It brought people to the arts, engendered thought, analysis, swagger, winners, and losers, and created a cache of art, whether on display or in storage, that will probably supply the cultural world with aesthetic grist for the next five hundred years.

  60.

  BARTON TALLEY, in an effort to get a piece of the booming market, made a lighthouse search around the globe for new artists, until his beam finally landed on China. China, whose artistic output for thousands of years relied on a tradition of calligraphy and flat perspective, seemed the unlikeliest place from which to emerge painting that would catch the attention of a western hemisphere art scene where the avant-garde was the norm.

  But Chinese art was hot. Yue Minjun, who sold the painting Execution in 1995 for five thousand dollars, must have been flattered and frustrated when it sold in 2007 for 5.9 million dollars. The surprise in all this activity was that the Chinese painters were reviving a dormant subject matter: political commentary, which had not piqued collectors’ interest for years. The message was, of course, diffused through the intangible glaze of artistic interpretation, making the artists somewhat safe from retribution by glaring Communist overlords.

  Barton Talley had asked Lacey several times to accompany him on reconnaissance missions to China to uncover artists who might have star power, but she turned him down, unwilling to leave her gallery even for a week during its crucial early days. She regretted her decisions as she watched even an uptown gallery with a reputation for conservatism have a successful sale of a middling Chinese artist.

  Proceeding parallel to the art boom was a real estate boom, inspired by crafty lenders who assured easy profits in home ownership, no money down. These weak paper promises to pay were sold off to investors in every corner of the world, and Wall Street saw a glut of money. Wads of cash fell off the money truck as it trundled through Chelsea, across 49th Street for a stop at Christie’s, and onward to Madison Avenue and Sotheby’s.

  The publicity that convinced broke home owners that they could make nice profits flipping their houses was the same as that which motivated moneyed art collectors to go further into the market than was practical. The lure in art collecting and its financial rewards, not counting for a moment its aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual rewards, is like the trust in paper money: it makes no sense when you really think about it. New artistic images are so vulnerable to opinion that it wouldn’t take much more than a whim for a small group of collectors to decide that a contemporary artist was not so wonderful anymore, was so last year. In the ebb and flow of artists’ desirability, some collectors wondered how a beautiful painting, once it had fallen from favor, could turn ugly so quickly.

  Lacey knew the contemporary market did not have the buoyancy of the modern art she had sold at Talley’s. Even the lamest Picasso could coax a bid from someone, but work by an unknown artist was valueless until someone decided to buy it. This was rather like doing business from a cloud, but it was the business she was in, and she decided that if she didn’t believe in it, neither would her customers. So in 2004, when Talley called her again, asking if she wanted to invest in a batch of pictures straight out of the studio by Feng Zhenj-Jie, a Chinese artist working in Beijing who painted Day-Glo images of glamour girls and was rumored to be sought after by several galleries, she listened.

  She would need a million five, said Talley, a sum to be matched by him, to purchase a half-share of thirty paintings at approximately one hundred thousand dollars each. Talley believed that the pictures could be sold for a quarter of a million each, plus or minus depending on size. Lacey didn’t really like Feng Zhenj-Jie’s work; it seemed to belong to the school of Playboy more than anything else. But the images were strong. Talley said, “You can spot a painting by Feng Zhenj-Jie across a room and never quite forget it.”

  “Is that so good?” asked Lacey. “If you can remember it completely, there’s nothing there when you go back.”

  “Lacey,” said Talley, “we’re talking about a moment. You buy the moment. There’s no way to know if the moment will last. I think the moment is coming for Feng Zhenj-Jie. There’s too much momentum. Everybody’s talking Chinese.”

  “Problem,” said Lacey. “I don’t have a million five. I’ve got about five hundred thousand, but I operate on it. It’s a cash pool I dip into, and it’s absolutely necessary. Ever had a client want to sell a painting that you sold them and you have to act like it’s the most desirable thing in the world so you give them their money back plus?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s why I need that cash.” Lacey declined the
offer.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid of these deals, Lacey, my advice to you.”

  “Odd, isn’t it?” she said. “You sell the conservative paintings and are risky in business, and I sell the risky paintings and I’m conservative in business.”

  One year later, Feng Zhenj-Jie set an auction record of three hundred fifty thousand dollars. He became an auction regular with consistent prices while Lacey sat by.

  She did, however, sell her uptown apartment for a nice profit and buy a loft in SoHo on margin. The new place was better suited to the display of her artists and better suited for the occasional art parties she threw—all promotional and therefore all deductible. Decorative sparseness was a practical aesthetic, requiring less expenditure on furniture and fixtures while still keeping up with the Joneses, whose imagined apartment was also bare.

  61.

  LACEY WAS NOW THIRTY-FIVE. If her inner light had softened, her ambition had not. But in New York, one’s sense of competition had to be practical: there was always someone doing better than you, always. Tanya Ross had acceded to department head, but Lacey still figured she had outdone Tanya simply because her name was in lights. There were rival dealers she couldn’t quite topple, like Andrea Rosen and Marianne Boesky—both dealers operating within blocks of her and with nicer galleries. And of course there was Gagosian, who could, it seemed, like a quantum particle, be in two places at once, emerging from the back room of either his uptown or his downtown gallery whenever an important client strolled in. There was no place within Lacey that could properly couch her envy. She just burned up inside and that was that.

  Agent Parks became a physical comfort for Lacey; there was evening activity between them that could be categorized as convenient, though there was a humor gap that Lacey could see and he could not. She never took him out to the art parties, and he never wanted to go out to the art parties. After all, he was an investigator of the very people he might meet, and he liked the surreptitiousness that guided their hours together. His business was clandestine encounters; why not have the same in his personal life, too?