The Collector's Apprentice

by B. A. Shapiro

  It’s early in the venture, and these things take time. A confidence game can’t be rushed. His last effort, his most profitable thus far, had been three years in the making. But he’s a patient man and enjoys the slow setup almost as much as the fast kill at the end.

  After he cleaned out the Everard Sureties Exchange offices in London, his suitcases full of money, he went to the United States and settled in New York City. He purchased a company that made ball bearings called Steel Bearings, Inc., and, after an infusion of cash, took it public. Once Steel Bearings was trading, he began buying up his own stock under various aliases, raising the share price in slow increments. Then he purchased three other companies and did the same thing.

  He let it be known around town that his holding company, Talcott Reserves, used a highly sophisticated, mathematical set of rules to invest in the market and consistently returned a 15 to 20 percent profit. When a number of men expressed an interest in investing with him, he allowed only a few to open accounts. A select few.

  Needless to say, no investments were made with the money these men tendered. He used the growth of his own companies to show paper profits—profits that his account holders almost always reinvested with Talcott and hardly ever cashed out—and kept all their money for himself. It’s the possibility of being accepted as an account holder with Talcott Reserves that he’ll be whispering into hungry ears that evening.

  His Majorca guests are an international crowd, and word will spread after the one or two men he takes on as investors begin to see the promised returns. Soon everyone will be clamoring to invest with Talcott Reserves, which has two floors of prime office space on Wall Street and a reputation for both exclusivity and profitability.

  But alas, Mr. Talcott will be forced to refuse almost all requests, which will only inspire more requests. This was how it worked for Everard Sureties, and this is how it will work for Talcott Reserves. It’s impossible to underestimate the recklessness of a man who thinks he’s getting in on a special deal.

  People desperately desire what’s denied them, and the longer it’s denied, the more they want it—and the fewer questions they ask when it’s ultimately in their hot little hands. Once he finally allows these men entrée to the Reserves, they’ll throw every last penny they have into their long-sought-after accounts. And then brag about it to their friends, who will come clamoring . . . who will tell their friends, who will come clamoring. . . . Greed makes fools of even the smartest and richest of men.

  And those are exactly the types he’s searching for. When he gets back to America, he’s got his eye on a lineup of potential investors: Charles Schwan, the steel titan; Howard Hopson of Associated Gas and Electric; Arthur Cutten, the most successful grain speculator in the world; Edwin Bradley, multimillionaire and art collector.

  As he predicted, Paulien Mertens left Paris with Bradley. And now she’s his assistant, soon to be ensconced within the Beaux-Arts splendor of his new museum. Once again, she’s in the lap of wealth and power. It appears it’s time for him to make a visit to Philadelphia.

  11

  Vivienne, 1923

  Dr. Bradley is so infuriated at the response to the academy show that if Vivienne didn’t know better, she’d think he was the creator of the artworks rather than just their owner. He stalks through the nearly vacant rental house, his fury echoing off bare walls of rooms emptied of furniture, yelling to no one, raging at the stupidity and small-mindedness. Vivienne stays in her bedroom office. She’s never seen behavior like this. It’s as if he’s gone mad.

  When he stops yelling, he turns to browbeating. He sends letters to every publisher and editor of every magazine and newspaper that had the audacity to pen a negative review of the show. He seethes at them all: the wealthy who use art to social-climb; the academics so set in the old that they can’t see their way to the new; the newspapers and museums too concerned with making money to take a risk.

  The Philadelphia art establishment is laughing at him, and Dr. Bradley cannot accept being taken for a fool—especially when he believes it’s his adversaries who are the fools. A more even-keeled man might have waited them out, smugly anticipating his I-told-you-so moment, but as Vivienne is rapidly learning, even keeled is not a description that applies to Dr. Bradley.

  She’s heard people talk—Gertrude Stein among them—about how mulish he can be, and he’s living up to that side of his reputation. Although Vivienne agrees with his sentiments, she doesn’t believe flinging personal insults in answer to comments based on artistic taste is the way to respond to criticism. She expected more of him.

  He calls her into his bedroom office about a week after the show. “They’re all going to pay,” he declares, waving his cigarette at her. “And I’ve just figured out how.”

  She waits.

  “If they refuse to see the virtuosity of Matisse and Picasso, then they won’t get to see them at all.” He stabs the cigarette into the ashtray and immediately lights another one. “I’ve decided there will be no museum. Not now, not while I’m alive—and not after I’m dead. Perfect, don’t you think?”

  “But what about your artwork? The new building?”

  “That’s the best part. I keep it all.”

  The expression on her face must be one of complete bafflement, because he starts to laugh. “It’s going to be a school. And only a school. A private school, closed to the public.”

  “Closed to the public?”

  “This way I get to choose who sees my art. Handpick an audience who will appreciate what I have here.”

  “But I thought you wanted the museum to introduce the people of Philadelphia to the future. That all they needed was some education.”

  “There will be no Bradley Museum. But there will be a Bradley School of Art Appreciation. With limited and restricted admission—each student’s acceptance subject to my personal approval.”

  Vivienne is so upset by the thought of all these glorious artworks being squirreled away that she makes the mistake of adding, “How will you persuade anyone to change their minds if you don’t let them see the paintings?”

  His face reddens, and he slams his fist on his desk. “The academy show proved to me that they are all too bullheaded to change. It’s not worth the effort.”

  They move into the new building at the end of April. Vivienne can now walk to work instead of taking two buses as she did to Bradley’s rental house, and she has an actual office. It’s small, to be sure, but there’s a wide window with a view of the massive gardens Ada has already begun to plant. She calls it the arboretum.

  Dr. Bradley’s office is next to Vivienne’s, large and commanding, and there’s another small one with a connecting door for the secretary he hasn’t yet hired. The remaining space is open, filled with desks for the teachers—who also haven’t been hired—to work on their lesson plans. Ada is down the hall, closer to the double doors that lead into their private quarters. Vivienne isn’t sure why she needs an office.

  It takes well over a month to hang all the artwork. Dr. Bradley’s ensembles, as he’s calling his groupings, are radical, challenging hundreds of years of tradition in art exhibition. They ask the viewer to interpret the works in a completely unique manner, a grand manifestation of the classroom at Dr. Bradley’s factory, where he asked the students to look at how differently Modigliani and Rousseau had approached the same subject. Instead of two paintings to compare and contrast, the ensembles include twelve or fifteen or twenty works on a single wall, organized not by chronology or geography or school but by the design elements of light, line, color, and space, sometimes subject.

  As she wanders the galleries, she stops at the south wall of Room 6 and laughs out loud. The ensemble is composed of a triangle of five Renoirs enclosing a central Gauguin and two Prendergasts, with a Seurat and a Manet on the fringes. The amusing part is the positioning of a set of double Windsor chairs, each with a curved seat resembling a pair of buttocks. The chairs sit directly beneath two oversize Renoir nudes who face a
way from the viewer, their fleshy bottoms positioned just above the chairs. Who knew Dr. Bradley was such a card?

  Although he might be a brute when confronted with disapproval, there’s no denying the breadth of his ideas and his ability to move beyond what came before to create something completely novel. A true visionary.

  Vivienne steps into Room 19. For the first time in over a year she stands in front of The Music Lesson, Matisse’s oversize family portrait, her favorite of the seven post-Impressionist paintings her father used to own. She had no idea that her last glimpse of it—the day before George vanished—was anything other than a casual visit to the colonnade. Now, rather than hanging on its own wall, it’s surrounded by thirteen other paintings, eleven metal objects, two chairs, and a bench holding five pieces of pottery; two andirons stand guard at its feet.

  Her fingers curl into fists. She longed to be reunited with her Music Lesson, pined for it for months, and here it is. Diminished. Insulted. Humiliated. She bows her head. Doesn’t Dr. Bradley understand that this seminal painting is a whole unto itself?

  She forces herself to look again. Now that one of her own is encased within an ensemble, her appreciation for Dr. Bradley’s groupings shifts. The gallery wall suddenly feels claustrophobic, its exacting symmetry painful to the eye, limiting to the mind. Matisse’s masterpiece is dwarfed, forced to play handmaiden to an assortment of lesser actors. Dr. Bradley not only bullies people, he bullies art.

  She wants to rip every other painting from the wall, wrench out the ridiculous metal keys and cookie cutters and door knockers, clear away each jug and vase. Music Lesson must be freed, as well as her other six. She can’t allow them to be held hostage by Dr. Bradley’s rigidity, imprisoned within his suffocating ensembles, unavailable to the world. To her. To her father.

  She quickly leaves the gallery and tries to calm herself by visualizing how these walls would appear if she were the collector and curator, if she were able to transform the Bradley into the Mertens Museum of Post-Impressionism. Hers would be a singular collection, honed and finely tuned, focusing on the arc of European and American painting between Impressionism and Abstraction. She would sell everything that didn’t fit within this model, buy more of what did, create space around each piece of art, liberate them all. No ensembles, no metal works, no pottery, no furniture, no Titian, no El Greco.

  Her pruning would provide the elbow room the works deserve, refine the collection to its truest self. And most importantly, she would throw the doors open seven days a week. For unlike Dr. Bradley, who wants to secret his art away, she wants to be its custodian, preserving and protecting it for future generations, sharing its greatness with the world. With the exception of the colonnade seven, which she would send to her father.

  Vivienne recognizes her inconsistency—some might say hypocrisy—but Papa deserves a small bit of recompense for all he lost; it’s the least she can do. It’s an impossible dream, an arrogant one that’s a betrayal of Dr. Bradley’s own vision, but she can’t shake it.

  When the teachers have been hired and trained, the students vetted and granted admission, classes begin at the Bradley School of Art Appreciation. There are no classrooms per se; rather, the entire building is the classroom. The teachers and students roam from gallery to gallery, standing or sitting on collapsible chairs, always looking. Dr. Bradley is teaching a number of courses, and Vivienne takes all of them.

  He’s far from the finest lecturer, the most articulate or the best prepared, but when he starts pulling painting after painting from the gallery walls, moving them from one room to the next, showing the class how the works are simultaneously the same and completely different from one another, she’s mesmerized by the novel connections. She winces when he touches one of her paintings with that ease of ownership, but still it’s clear that he has great passion for his subject. She’s a person of passion, and she responds to this. Maman used to complain about all the nannies who quit because she wouldn’t mind them—and the tutors who were infuriated when she refused to do her lessons or respond to their calls because she was lost amid her paintings.

  Although Dr. Bradley’s curatorial ideas may differ from hers, it’s obvious that he, like she, is animated by great art. He says he sees this in her, too. In the way she sits forward in her chair, the way she doesn’t stop looking, the way she hardly ever takes notes with her pencil but always takes notes with her eyes. Sometimes it’s as if she’s with her father.

  But other times, he doesn’t act like her father at all. “There are only three types of line,” Dr. Bradley tells her sternly one day. “That’s what is in my notes, and that’s how you’ll type it up for the lesson.” They’re in his office, working on a new class based on his notion that the only way to understand an artist’s intention is by analyzing his work through the four design elements of light, line, color, and space.

  Vivienne has spent time thinking about this and believes he’s missing something that will make the course better. “Doesn’t it seem like there’s an expressive type of line? The way a long, flat line feels calm and a series of sharp, slanted ones feel angry? More—”

  “That’s not a different type, it’s a subcategory of the other three. Lines are actual, implied, or psychic. That’s it.”

  “When you think about it, though, doesn’t it seem more than just a subordinate?” she persists, warming to the argument, remembering how she and her father used to discuss their different views, weigh the pros and cons, synthesize their ideas into something better than either one of them could have come up with alone. How much fun it was.

  “Like maybe it should be considered a type all its own?” she continues. “You keep telling us to look, to think for ourselves, to ferret out what the artist—”

  “That’s in the classroom, Miss Gregsby,” he interrupts again, frowning. “Not when you’re working. Your job here is to help organize what I tell you into a lecture, not to contradict ideas I’ve developed over many years of critical thought.”

  Vivienne is annoyed by his tone but blames herself for causing his irritation. By now she’s learned that the way to get Dr. Bradley to think differently is for him to believe that he came up with an idea himself, never to attempt to instruct him.

  A few days later, as they’re walking past The Joy of Life hanging on its own in the large stairwell, dominating the space, the viewer, she tells him that she’s going to stay there for a while. “Of course,” she says as she settles on the top step, “I’ve looked at this many times before, but you’re right about seeing more each time you contemplate a great work of art.”

  “I’ll join you.” He sits down next to her, closer than she would have expected.

  They contemplate the painting in companionable silence.

  “Are you enjoying yourself here?” Dr. Bradley asks.

  “How could I not be, with all of this surrounding me?” she answers, her eyes fixed on the painting.

  “You’re not homesick? I wouldn’t want you to be sorry you came.”

  He rarely talks about personal things and has never asked about her private life. She thinks about the letters she writes to her father and to Tante Natalie, of the responses she doesn’t receive, although her return address is included in every missive; clearly they still believe she was in on the con. That damn George is going to pay. “Sometimes,” she finally admits. “But not so much that I want to go back,” she lies.

  “That’s good to know.”

  She says nothing and then points to the voluptuous bodies, the arched tree trunks, the wavy clouds. “I’m taken by the way Henri uses curved lines here. Their softness and richness draw you in like an invitation. To a place so full of delight that the viewer can do nothing but feel the same.”

  “Well put.”

  She brushes off the rare compliment but is encouraged by it. “And there in the far background, behind the dancing and frolicking, is the only straight line in the composition. The horizontal. The blue-and-purple sea, soothing and tranquil.�
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  “You’re doing well here,” he says, touching her shoulder with the briefest of gestures. “And listening to you makes me even more pleased that you aren’t homesick.”

  Vivienne glances at him, and when their eyes meet, she sees a softening in his. She places her elbows on her knees, rests her chin on her fists, and once again they contemplate The Joy of Life in silence.

  Over the next couple of months, Vivienne and Dr. Bradley grow closer as they work together on hanging the artwork, developing course curricula, and handling the day-to-day details of running a school. She hasn’t broached the possibility of allowing the public to view the collection. They’ve been getting on well, and she’s seen his reaction to criticism. She’s biding her time, which isn’t easy.

  She’s also taken on a project of her own—a game, really—propelled by her musings about the Bradley collection as the Mertens Museum of Post-Impressionism. It makes her feel closer to her father, who drifts further away with each day Vivienne Gregsby moves forward. She hopes that he reads the letters he doesn’t answer, that he knows she’s with their colonnade seven.

  She and Papa used to talk endlessly about what post-Impressionism was and what it wasn’t. They agreed that the later works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Seurat, Vuillard, and Derain all fit within the school, but they never came to a satisfactory conclusion about how each one fed into the other, nor which other artists should be included in the group. She argued for Picasso, but Papa believed that Cubism and Abstraction were outside the frame.