History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  Elaine laughed loudly. “You are such an asshole.”

  “You’ve been talking to Marianne.”

  She hugged him and pressed her cheek into his furry shoulder. “I don’t need to compare notes with your wife. You were a lousy date last night.”

  He stopped combing. “I know.”

  She patted his shoulder and gave him a soft kiss on the lips. “Bye-bye,” she said.

  In the elevator, she caught sight of her reflection in the polished metal of the closed doors. The plunging neckline of the dark purple sundress contrasted nicely with her pale skin. The India-print fabric was so light she imagined that if a breeze caught it, the dress would unwrap itself and be carried off by the wind. She had bobbed her hair and dyed it a deep auburn. She lifted her chin at her reflection. Not bad, she thought. Something about the necklace still irked her, the way it made itself known—felt—the clammy weight of it at the base of her throat. She slipped her finger beneath the strand, as if to stretch it out. She undid the clasp and held the necklace loosely in her fist. She had told her mother she would come by for brunch with Ernie, who was recently home after his bypass. As she walked to the subway, she imagined letting the heavy strand slip through her fingers. What would she do with such a thing? And why had Joe given it to her? It was hard for her to imagine the wardrobe that would complement this particular piece of jewelry. A fur coat? With nothing but implants and a fake tan beneath. She dropped the necklace into the depths of her oversized bag. Her cell phone rang. It was Joe.

  “For God’s sake, what?” she said.

  “I’m an ass,” he said.

  “You dialed the phone for that?”

  “It was a stupid present. So not you.”

  “I gave it to a homeless woman.”

  “Serves me right.” He paused, and she waited. “I wanted to show you, to tell you—”

  “Show and tell, hm?”

  “OK. Enough. We both know it was a mistake.”

  “These things happen to rich people who are spread too thin,” Elaine said.

  “Some sympathy, please, for a mortal man.”

  “That was it,” Elaine said. “You missed it.”

  She was smiling now, poised at the stairs leading down to the subway. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m at the train. I’ll lose you.”

  She took the PATH train out of the city and walked the five blocks from the station to the house her mother shared with Ernie. She felt the walk would do her good, work the last of the champagne out of her system and clear her head. The morning felt bright and sharp. She started to call ahead, then hung up. Of course the coffee would be on.

  She let herself in through the back door, which opened into a vestibule through which one walked to the kitchen. The room had been a tiny sun porch and was now a laundry room with a view, as her mother described it. Through the French doors to the kitchen, Elaine watched her mother settling Ernie at the table. She heard the tones of their conversation, but not the words. She didn’t want to interrupt. Ernie spoke, and he gazed up at his wife from his seat, waiting to be delighted by her reply. Elaine recognized her mother’s tone—sassy, jokingly disrespectful. Ernie had willingly provided the setup, so that she could dazzle him with the punch line. He laughed and grabbed her hand, swinging. His tone said, “You are something, kid.” Elaine’s mother smiled and took Ernie’s chin in her hand. They kissed, and she gave his cheek a playful slap. Elaine reached up to her neck to touch the pearls. Then she remembered she’d put them in her bag.

  She pushed through the door and cleared her throat elaborately, making a low bow. Ernie and her mother shouted out to her.

  “Now we can open the champagne,” Ernie said.

  Elaine made a sour face. She couldn’t stop it coming. “Welcome home,” she said. “How was the hospital?”

  “Eh,” Ernie said, “I’m alive. I can’t complain.”

  “He’ll insist that we drink mimosas,” her mother said.

  Ernie lifted his arms from the table, the maroon bells of his bathrobe sleeves sliding down his arms. Green and yellow bruises marked his skin. “I do insist. Someone’s got to have a good time for me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Elaine said, swallowing carefully.

  Ernie clasped his hands in front of him on the table and said, “So, kid—tell me, what’s new?”

  She hadn’t told them about Joe and couldn’t begin to now. The last three years of assignations she had presented to Ernie and her mother as a series of mostly unrelated vignettes, featuring subjects at times who were mythical or legendary, antagonists or anti­heroes. Ernie would shake his head or cluck his tongue. “Chin up, kid,” he’d say. “You can have whatever you want.” She’d nod, and the three of them would bow their heads, as if beholding on the tabletop the very tableaux of these events, unified only by their inconclusiveness. Joe didn’t exist for them, and there was nothing to discuss anyway; the relationship would never be anything more than it was.

  Elaine picked a piece of orange pulp from her lower lip. “I’m thinking of going camping.”

  Ernie leaned forward. “Uh-oh, she’s dating an outdoorsman.”

  Elaine let herself be teased. “He wants to go to Cumberland Island.”

  Her mother squinted at her. “Really,” she said.

  “Yup. That’s what he said.”

  “Which one is this?” her mother asked.

  “Joe,” she said. “This one’s Joe.” But not her Joe. Her Joe didn’t know from camping, and if he thought she did he never would have hooked up with her. Not the outdoorsy type, he’d said. Neither was she, really.

  Ernie looked at her expectantly. “There’s nothing new,” she said. For a moment she considered telling Ernie and her mother about Joe, the real one. “I’ve got a guy who gives me pearls.” But that sounded like the opening to a bad Jewish blues song.

  “Camping, huh?” Ernie raised his arms again. “Amazing, isn’t it, Alice?”

  Alice’s eyebrows lifted. “I’ll say. My daughter was no Girl Scout.”

  Elaine excused herself to the bathroom. Inside she turned on the fan to block out Alice and Ernie’s happy chatter. The butter-yellow ceramic tiles gleamed in the soft light. In the mirror, in her mother’s bathroom in Chatham, her India-print dress reflected dully. Her collarbones protruded and her neck looked strained. Horizontal lines made their grim necklaces across her throat, and the skin there was papery, fragile. The short bob—so chunky and bright—looked perverse. The vintage dress and the dismal jute sandals—she squeezed her eyes shut and shoved her fists into the sockets. “Don’t be stupid,” she muttered. “Drink your drink. Be happy.”

  She returned to the table, her eyes throbbing. A muscle jumped in her right eyelid. Ernie regarded her closely. He pressed his lips together, and his face began to quiver. Alice placed her hand over his and spoke to Elaine. “It’s the operation—and the drugs. He gets weepy.”

  Ernie wept openly, and Elaine gasped. “Ernie, what is it?”

  “You never ask me favors anymore.” He bawled into his lap. Alice knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around him.

  “He’s OK,” she said. “You’re OK—it’s the drugs.”

  Elaine wracked her brain, trying to think of some favor. Turn back the clock. Make me young again. That would be in poor taste. She thought of Paul the dermatologist, of their dancing and subsequent dating. She had been fond of him.

  Ernie managed to get control of himself. “But you have what you want.” He wiped his eyes. “It’s amazing, really, how you kids can imagine any kind of life for yourselves.” He looked at Alice. “Not that I would want anything different.”

  “Of course not,” Alice said. She put her head in his lap.

  He turned to Elaine, his eyes filling again. “But you,” he said, his voice husky, “you can have whatever you want.”

  Elaine touched the base of her throat and felt her cool fingers there. She realized she wouldn’t cry. “I have,” she said, “I have what I want.”r />
  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this book is set in ANDERSEN, named for the ­seventeenth-century founder Jan Andersen. Nils Pieter, an ­apprentice to Andersen, is credited with the design. The two shared a long correspondence after Pieter’s apprenticeship, and the type appears to be based on Andersen’s handwriting. The irregular shape of the serifs makes this type an impractical choice for most printed matter.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  Little is known of the designer of HROSVITHA. The type is the sole creation of a German nun of the sixteenth century. How she acquired the skills to create such an elaborate type remains a mystery, but the influence of illuminated texts is obvious. The type was named for the earliest-known female playwright, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim. Though popular for a time in early 1930s Germany, the type is lately considered quaint and difficult to read.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  This book has been set in ELEGANTINE. Lord Randolph ­Sterling designed the type in the 1890s, exclusively for the setting of his wife’s books. Marianne Sterling was the daughter of a milliner and a seamstress. After Lord Sterling’s father disowned him, ­Marianne supported the family by writing erotica. Shortly after the turn of the century, Sterling’s father was embarrassed at a party by a recitation of his daughter-in-law’s writing. He arranged to have the ­couple “frightened,” with the hope that he could offer them passage to America and so be rid of his shame. During the melee at Sterling’s workshop, Randolph Sterling was accidentally killed. Marianne was committed to an insane asylum.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  SUWANNEE MODERN was created in 1972 by Jonathan Howell. The Georgia native worked as a graphic artist in Manhattan, drawing advertisements for Bloomingdale’s. He designed this type specifically for poster lettering. SUWANNEE MODERN enjoyed popularity during the 1980s among a group of women artists, whose guerrilla-style postering attracted the attention of Garment District workers and the homeless, who used the posters as bedsheets. A few of these posters have been collected to form a traveling exhibition, which has revived interest in this little-known movement. Most of the posters have been lost to time and the weather.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  This book has been set in PRAGUE SANS SERIF, created in 1790 by the Dutch designer Bernard Kopland. The type is Kopland’s attempt at Renaissance-style lettering; what is thought to be an earlier version was found, gouged and abraded, in the Utrecht attic studio where Kopland worked. Two workmen refitting the house for a young couple discovered the type. One workman pocketed the W and the L, for those were his girlfriend’s initials. She adhered magnets to the backs of the plates and affixed them to her refrigerator. The other workman—the gasfitter—phoned the Historical Society, and this earlier version of PRAGUE SANS SERIF now resides, sans W and L, in the Historical Society’s museum in Utrecht.

  In his day, the clean lines of Kopland’s design went largely unappreciated. The type is now prized for its quiet dignity, which imposes order on the chaos of postmodern text. Kopland never visited the city for which he named this type; records show he never left Utrecht. The circumstances surrounding his death by drowning at the age of thirty-eight remain unknown.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  No one can pinpoint the exact provenance of UNIVERSAL ­HUMANES. The Roman type’s easy readability made it popular for handbills early in the seventeenth century, and its use continued through the many mechanical revolutions in typesetting and design across centuries. Through many years of reproduction, small alterations to the type were introduced, most notably these: in 1780, the punch cutter Jan Ahlman, distracted by the imminent birth of his first grandchild, rushed the production of a set of type and inadvertently truncated the lowercase a’s serif; in 1829, ­William Quinn, whose eyes were going, enlarged the tittles of the i and j; later that century, Aloysius Jones, a recently freed slave, slanted the counter of the lowercase e; his daughter, Aretha Jones, made her own mark on the design in the early twentieth century by rotating the thinnest parts of the uppercase O from twelve and six to eleven and five. These alterations were faithfully reproduced by punch cutters and machinists, and were even copied or borrowed by other designers for their fonts, hoping to achieve the clarity and transparency of UNIVERSAL HUMANES. The current version of the type, which is still much admired, likely bears little resemblance to its model.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  CYRILLIC BOOK comprises a suite of fonts intended to aid in the preservation of eastern European dialects. A group of scholars and designers worked together to prepare the font; their intent was to create a clean type that was easy to reproduce mechanically or digitally—on whatever equipment available. After a hopeful decade of implementation, most of the texts produced in this type were destroyed by fire. Some texts were found in mass graves, cleaned, and displayed in the Museum of Twentieth-Century Genocides until that building was destroyed under mysterious circumstances. The last living designer of CYRILLIC BOOK lives alone in San Diego and works mainly as a translator. He speaks to his relatives in Bosnia once a month. He no longer visits.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  MONOLITH POST-VOX was created by Bert Fisher, a disciple of the artist and typeface designer Eric Gill. Fisher fell under Gill’s thrall decades after Gill’s death, while studying printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fisher became obsessed with Gill’s assertion that typeface was a thing unto itself; it did not represent another thing, the way a painting or a photograph might. To honor his hero’s maxim, Fisher endeavored to create an unreadable type, one that could not be used to transmit meaning in any language. In this he succeeded; most of the letters were unrecognizable, which violated Gill’s basic principle—somehow overlooked by Fisher—that the skeletons of letters could not be fundamentally altered. At the opening exhibition of MONOLITH POST-VOX, one typeface designer exclaimed, “Fisher has broken the bones of the alphabet!” For a while, Fisher delighted in his bad-boy status, until an unknown art student made a discovery that undermined his manifesto. After minute examination, she found embedded in each letter a tableau, printed in relief. To the naked eye the design appeared abstract, but under magnification, each tableau could be discerned, and each contributed to a larger story, which could be read sequentially. Fisher had indeed hidden a representation within his typeface, a narrative that some believe autobiographical. Fisher has since dropped from view and is rumored to be teaching English in China.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  CATSKILLS LINEALES debuted in the 1990s at the Catskills Mountain retreat of the artist and designer Alice Connaty and her husband, Marc Peary. The pair summered in a borrowed cabin with their two daughters for all fifteen years of their marriage. They worked via correspondence on the type, even while living together. This method caused delays in production, so that when the type was finally completed, the need for it had expired: the company that had hired the pair had gone out of business. Connaty and Peary’s daughters projected the type onto old sheets and made sequential graphic narratives, which they hung in the trees throughout the woods. Neighbors and visitors delighted in these whimsical surprises. The sheets were left to deteriorate in the elements.

  The daughters live a nomadic life, staying in rented or borrowed cabins all over the US, and they collaborate on installations in natural settings. Their ephemeral works often appear in the pages of popular art magazines. Individuals and corporations pay the women large sums of money to create work with a short life span for weddings, conferences, and the public offering of stocks. One of the daughters—each one blames the other—coined the phrase “epideictic installations,” which helps some of their clients feel better about spending large sums of money on art that won’t exist in a few months. Brides-to-be with a certain education and social standing recognize the sculptures as more sophisticated versions of organza bows and candles in hurricane lamps bedecked with ribbons in their colors. Couples pose for their engagement photos amid assemblages created by the two, and they send the photos to the New Yo
rk Times. For these couples, the girls create entire landscapes for rehearsal dinners, weddings, and after-parties. They take no direction, only payment.

  “You don’t know if you’re getting Long Island beachscape,” said one bride-to-be, “or Mars.”

  Considerable competition has arisen to secure the duo’s services. Brides compare photos and secretly rank the installations, finding reasons to favor their own. The daughters of Alice Connaty and Marc Peary are not troubled by any of this. They experience animal contentment when creating, so they work without ceasing.

  Alice Connaty works as a life coach in Brooklyn. Marc Peary earns a living as a draftsman in Minneapolis. The two correspond regularly via the US Postal Service. Neither owns a cell phone, though they do converse on landlines. Alice Connaty owns a rotary phone from the 1940s, which she repaired herself, with help from a manual she checked out of the New York City Public Library system. After twenty minutes of talking to her ex-husband, she laughs softly and tells him, “Marc, my wrist hurts! This phone is so heavy.” Marc Peary still closes their conversations with the words “I love you,” and Alice responds, “I love you, too.”

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  No book has been set in this type. In fact, it isn’t finished, and it has no name. JOSH, its creator, doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to work on it. He usually puts in two or three hours after his eight-hour shift at Borders. His girlfriend, JENNA, also works at Borders. They both graduated from college last year, Jenna with a degree in music composition, Josh with a double major in poetics and drawing.