The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)

by Charlotte Elkins

  “Certainly,” Clark said agreeably, not as much irritated by her latest remarks as one might think. He was indeed proud of not having gone to Harvard, proud that his only college degrees were a BA in entrepreneurial studies from Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, and an almost-MFA in art history from Montana State at Bozeman. And especially proud that he’d been born without a silver spoon in his mouth, or any spoon at all, and yet here he was with this collection of fancy-school PhDs taking orders from him. He had come from nothing—an absentee father, a motel-maid mother—had paid his own way here, and had done it on his own, with dedication, perseverance, and innate smarts. Why wouldn’t he be proud of himself? The good looks and that killer smile hadn’t hurt either; he had to admit that.

  “Now then,” he said, “you all know that Integrated Marketing Systems has been studying our operation for some time. They have now analyzed the data from the movement-sensor time recorders that were in place most of the last two months, and have turned in their report, and yesterday evening the board unanimously accepted their recommendations and directed that they be implemented. The point of this meeting is to inform you of them.” He cleared his throat and shuffled through the few papers in front of him.

  “This is not going to be good,” said Madge to no one in particular. “He looks too happy about it.”

  On another day that definitely would have gotten under Clark’s skin, but on this particular morning it slid off him like sizzling droplets from a Teflon pan. “The most substantive change thus far will occur—has occurred—in Photography,” he said. “The IMS study makes it amply clear that the photographic wing provides our least effective client interface functionalities, in that—”

  Client interface functionalities, Vandervere mouthed silently, his face a mask of pain.

  “—in that our clients spend almost no time there, and most of them—most, you understand, not some—simply pass it by without a glance. So . . . as of this morning, the photographic wing is no more. The contents will be going into storage over the next few days, for future deaccession consideration.”

  This had the intended effect. They were stunned. One of the five curatorial divisions gone, poof, just like that? “We’re closing down Photographs because it didn’t get enough . . . enough eyeballs?” Vandervere said with a disbelief that matched the expressions on the faces of the others.

  “No, not because it didn’t get enough eyeballs; because it didn’t get enough eyeball time, and lack of eyeball time is an indicator of a client-perceived shortfall in our ecosystem. If we hope to put the Brethwaite on a sounder financial footing—and by that I mean increased memberships, increased donations, increased attendance, increased admission income—such shortfalls need to be perceptually recontextualized.”

  “Perceptually recontextualized.” The curator of Decorative Arts, aka Madge’s husband Drew Temple, emitted a harsh, clipped laugh. “Forgive the expression, Clark, but that is such a total load of bullshit, even for you. With all due respect, of course.”

  Clark’s smile broadened. He thought exactly the same thing. He enjoyed throwing in the marketing gobbledygook because it never failed to upset them, but he didn’t know what the hell most of it meant either. He got most of it from a “jargon generator” on the Web: three columns of buzzwords—verbs, adjectives, and nouns—that you could combine any way you liked to produce mind-boggling business-oriented neologisms: disintermediated cross-platform functionalities, integrated Web-enabled algorithms, orchestrated user-centric paradigms. He’d started doing it as a joke in the early days, when they were all still friends, more or less, but to his amazement they’d never gotten it. The silly terms just rankled and confused them. So naturally, he’d kept it up.

  Madge must have thought that Drew had overdone it, because she stepped in now. “I think that what Drew was trying to say, Clark—”

  “What Drew was trying to say is precisely what Drew said,” Drew snapped at her. “I don’t see that interpretation is required.”

  Madge cheerfully pulled an imaginary dagger from her chest. “Pardon me for living.”

  What an unlikely couple they were, Clark thought. Madge was straight out of a family sitcom: fat and sassy; unable to keep her mouth shut and damn the consequences. Drew couldn’t have been more different. A waspish, discontented man, other than his boringly predictable grousing over any and everything, he kept his thoughts and feelings to himself. Clark had distrusted him from the start.

  “Clark, I’d like to say something here,” Vandervere said in that equable, aren’t-I-reasonable tone that never failed to make the senior curator grind his teeth. “I understand the need to cut back, but consider for a moment: our Photography department is a one-of-a-kind historic resource: the finest photographic record in existence of early irrigation in the Coachella Valley and the initial construction phases of the Coachella Canal.”

  Clark, who wore reading glasses down low on his nose during meetings, peered drolly over them. “And your point is?”

  This time Vandervere declined the bait and shifted the subject. “And what will happen to Werner?”

  “Yes, and where is old Wernerschnitzel, anyway?” Madge added.

  “Werner won’t be with us today,” Clark replied. “Obviously, with no need for a Photography department, there’s no need for a curator of Photography. I spoke with him earlier this morning and offered him the management of the gift shop, a new position. Oh, did I mention that the days of blue-haired lady volunteers are as of now a thing of the past? Whether Werner accepts it or not, I saw no reason for him to continue to attend the curatorial staff meetings.”

  This sent new shock waves around the table. Manager of the gift shop? Werner Mayehoff? Werner, who had been there longer than any of them, the only curator who’d been around since Day One in 1996, an old friend of L. Morgan Brethwaite’s himself? If it could happen to Werner, then how safe were any of them?

  “And what about the rest of the departments?”

  This from the one person who hadn’t been heard from until now. The curator of Prints and Drawings, Alfie Wellington, wasn’t much of a contributor at staff meetings or anywhere else. Since neither museums nor the art in them excited his interest very much any longer, he was often unengaged, to put it charitably. The next oldest of the remaining curators (after Prentice), a rotund sixty-year-old with a chubby-cheeked face that was made to be merry but rarely had been in recent years, he had come to the museum as a relatively young man in 1998, in what he must have imagined to be a step toward a bigger, better future at some bigger, better museum. Yet here he was, more than fifteen years later, at the same museum, in the same position, with nowhere to go.

  It wasn’t entirely his fault. As with the other curators, there hadn’t been much for him to do to distinguish himself. There had been no blockbuster exhibitions to set up, no major acquisitions with which to scoop competing institutions, not really much of anything, as far as Clark could see, that wouldn’t have been the province of curatorial assistants or interns at any other decent museum.

  The four of them were all in the same boat in that regard, and they reacted true to their own natures: Madge with her barbed and supposedly funny throwaway lines, Drew with tightly repressed resentment, Prentice with “civilized” equanimity. And Alfie? Alfie had turned to booze. He wasn’t what most people would call a drunk, not the kind who goes around staggering and slurring his speech, or snoring through meetings, but he was never without enough alcohol in his system to soften life in general with a calming, distancing fuzz. Even now, at 9:15 in the morning, the smell of bourbon on his breath had the others giving him plenty of room.

  And yet here he was, raising the question that no one else had dared ask.

  “Ah, the rest of the departments,” Clark said. “I was coming to that. Now, I want you to know there’s nothing personal in this. I hope that’s understood.”

 
“Oh, that’s really reassuring,” Madge said dryly.

  “Yes,” Drew agreed, “that makes all the difference in the world.”

  “I have to tell you that there’s going to be some necessary streamlining in the next few weeks,” Clark said. “The museum reopens in early April, and by that time . . .” He pushed the glasses up on his nose and studied the papers in front of him as if he didn’t already know perfectly well what they said.

  “First, Prints and Drawings.” (A nod toward Alfie.) “The Prints sub-department, which failed to meet the customer-interaction criteria devised by IMS and approved by our board, will be closed down, and the number of prints sharply reduced. What remains will be combined with Paintings” (a nod to Prentice) “into a single department of Paintings and Drawings under one curator, so I’m afraid we will be eliminating one more curatorial-level position.”

  Alfie’s head came up sharply. “You going to offer me the gift shop too, if Werner doesn’t take it?”

  “I didn’t say that, Alfie. Whether you or the good professor will be offered the curatorship has yet to be decided. We’re working on it now. Be reassured.”

  “Oh, right,” Alfie said with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, “you’re going to give it to me and tell Prentice Faversham Vandervere to take a hike. Oh, yes, that makes sense.”

  Clark was enjoying himself even more than he’d expected. In four months, this was the first time he’d come close to getting a rise out of boozy, laid-back Alfie. “Actually, that is highly possible,” he said, with a more meaningful look at Vandervere, who returned it evenly. “As I said, it has yet to be decided. All options are on the table.”

  Now he turned to Madge and Drew, who were looking satisfactorily apprehensive. “A similar situation exists with your two departments. Our Furnishings gallery and two of our three Decorative Arts exhibits will be closed down for lack of interactive client activity. Costumes, however, does very well. Therefore, the two departments will be folded into a new Costumes and Decorative Arts department under Madge’s directorship. Drew, you will remain in charge of the Decorative Arts portion.” He paused. “We envision an assistant curator title.”

  That brought a rare serious expression of emotion from Madge. “But that would mean that I would be my husband’s . . . my husband’s . . .” She looked to Drew for assistance.

  Drew, however, said nothing, but only eyed Clark with flinty dislike.

  “That Drew would report to you?” Clark said innocently. “Why yes, now that I think about it, it would certainly seem to follow, wouldn’t it? That is, if it’s decided that a head of Decorative Arts is necessary at all. And that”—he fixed Drew with one of his cooler smiles—“will depend largely on what we see from you in the next few weeks, Drew.”

  Clark gathered his papers and stood up. “That takes care of the first part of our agenda. Be back at ten thirty. Mrs. B will be here. So will Alix London. And we’ll have pastries to go with the coffee.”

  “Wow, pastries; what a jolly affair this is turning into,” Madge grumped as a frowning, abstracted Drew dragged her off. Vandervere, whose knee had been shattered in the Korean War, stood up with a wince and limped grimly away. Alfie hurried off to his desk for some Jim Beam to put in his coffee.

  “See y’all at ten thirty!” Clark called happily after them. “Y’all come back now!”

  This, Alix thought with a sinking heart, is going to get me in trouble. Big time.

  She was standing in front of an enormous painting, seventeen feet long by eight feet wide, so large that it couldn’t be hung on the museum’s curving walls, but stood a few feet out, attached to a steel framework built especially for it. The picture’s surface was all sweeping, brightly colored skeins and swirls, and swarms of glowing white specks and spots, thousands of them, on a field that seemed a deep, velvety black until you looked harder and saw the grays, the rusts, the umbers that ran through it. There was nothing even close to a solid form, let alone a recognizable object. It was the kind of picture that could be interpreted in a thousand ways. For some, the works of this artist conjured up the vastness of the Milky Way, for others the dark and unfathomable depths of the ocean, or the mystery of a single cell or an atom. Still others saw in it the ineffable, orchestrated chaos of the cosmos.

  So it was said. But Alix was smiling to herself. She would have been willing to bet that the most common reaction was more along the lines of a bemused “My kid (my dog, my cat, a trained monkey) could do better than that.”

  The title didn’t offer much help as to what it was supposed to be: Untitled 1952.

  Neither did the “explanatory” legend:

  Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). Pollock was an early exponent of Abstract Expressionism. He electrified the art world with his method of tacking canvases to the floor and walking up and down alongside them, flinging, dripping, pouring, and splattering paint. Many of his works, such as the one you see here, are either untitled or simply assigned numbers in order to “make people look at a picture for what it is and not what it ‘represents’—pure painting.” Pollock frequently attacked art critics who claimed to find hidden symbols in his work. He insisted that there was no “meaning” in the finished work, but only in the process of creating it. His advice to viewers was to “look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for.” Any interpretation or evaluation of the finished work was a personal projection, neither wrong nor right, but perfectly valid . . . for that person.

  Alix, being classically trained, did not much care for this all-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder approach to art, which she considered just this side of hokum, but that wasn’t the source of her unease. What was bothering her was that she thought the painting was not a genuine Pollock. Or more accurately, it wasn’t that she thought it wasn’t genuine, it was that she felt it wasn’t genuine. And that’s what she was so depressingly certain would get her into trouble. It hadn’t failed yet.

  This was not one of the pieces destined for auction, but would remain at the museum, so no one had asked her to look at it, no one had requested her opinion on its authenticity, and, for sure, no one was going to be happy to hear it. But what choice did she have? She couldn’t just let it pass. Well, all right, she could, but she knew she wouldn’t.

  “Jack the Dripper,” somebody said behind her. “What a piece of work.”

  She turned. “Pollock or the painting?”

  “Take your pick.”

  Jerry Swanson, in his forties, dumpy, balding, and brash as a carnival barker, was the appraiser from Endicott Fine Art Auction Galleries who was assessing the works to be sold by the gallery—twenty-eight in all. It was he who had suggested to the Brethwaite that a little competent touch-up work on some of the paintings would dramatically increase the prices they would bring; a suggestion that had resulted in Alix being there now.

  “Jerry,” she said, turning back to the canvas, “what do you think of this picture?”

  “Hey, they don’t pay me to think about them, lady, they pay me to set the expected price ranges.”

  Jerry’s standard mode of speech was the wisecrack. With his old-fashioned, black-rimmed spectacles and his round face, he made Alix think of a smart-aleck owl. He had a snappy delivery; talking to him could be like catching a Borscht Belt comedian in mid-shtick—that, or a hang-on-to-your-wallet used-car shyster. Nevertheless, he was a friendly, engaging, outgoing guy, he laughed a lot, and he was pleasant to be around.

  “Okay, go ahead and set it. What would you say the market value would be?”

  “Sorry, I’m being paid to appraise exactly twenty-eight pictures, and this ain’t one of ’em.”

  She smiled. “You only give your opinion if somebody’s paying you?”

  “Of course. Why would I waste a perfectly good opinion when somebody might be conned into paying me a
ctual money for it some other time?”

  “Come on, be serious for a minute. Just a general idea. I’m not going to hold you to it.”

  He lifted his plump chin and drew himself up. “Sorry, I have certain ethical and professional standards to which I adhere.” He followed with a conspiratorial eyebrow wiggle. “So how much are you offering?”

  “Well, it’s pretty important. I guess I’d go as much as . . . oh . . . how about a nickel?”

  “Now you’re talking. Done!” He looked back at the painting. “Somewhere between ten and thirty million, I’d say.”

  “That much?” Her heart sank a little further.

  “It’s a Pollock,” he said simply. “You don’t know what they sell for?”

  “Actually, no. A lot, I gather.”

  “I thought you advised people on what to buy.”

  “I do, but not on the basis of market value. What I try to gauge is artistic value.”

  “Oh, artistic value,” he said merrily, as if it were a private joke between them. “Okay, but why all the interest in this particular one?”

  “Well, actually, I’m having some doubts about it. Jerry, tell me, honestly, what’s your opinion? Not its monetary value—I can’t afford another nickel—but its—”

  “Artistic value?” he supplied. “Well, let me see.” Arms folded, he slowly scanned it from one end to the other, all seventeen feet of it. “When I look at this,” he said, seriously for him, “you know what I see?”