In front of her, on loan from Paris, was Andrea Mantegna's Ecce Homo. Bound for crucifixion, crowned with thorns, Christ stared out of the canvas, pale and gold, his head and torso rendered as stone. To Althea the scratches on his flesh were like striations in marble.
Of all the paintings, drawings, and prints in the exhibition, it was this one, haunting and severe, which captured her most. The sacred and the profane: this is the great dichotomy, she thought. Once almost all art was for sacred purposes; now almost none of it is. The conventions, the subjects, the iconography are no longer a common language.
What has twentieth-century abstraction lost by purifying itself of these associations? Althea considered, as she left the exhibit. Now that abstraction is going out of style, some artists have returned to figurative painting. But they parody the conventions and warp art's sacred language to political statement. As much as the message, it's their execution I dislike—so often blatant, didactic, and ugly, she concluded.
As Althea walked along the balcony above the museum's great hall, absorbed in these judgments, she overheard an exchange without intending to. It concerned a lecture on art conservation that was apparently soon to take place. The subject piqued her interest, and she interrupted the speakers—two women—to inquire. One, thin and strong-looking, with iron-gray hair and startling light-blue eyes, directed Althea towards the information desk in the lobby.
"Better hurry," she said, shooing Althea along with a gesture of her hand. As Althea obeyed, she heard the second woman say to the first in a low voice evidently not meant for Althea's ears, "But she won't be able to get in."
Because of her resistance to that comment, Althea persisted, after a young man at the information desk with a bored and languid manner motioned her to the museum's education offices with a limp wave of his hand.
"This must be your lucky day," said another young man with more energy. "Seats for this lecture sold out months and months ago. It's part of a series that's very difficult to get into. Robin Bromley, who gives the lectures, is the head of the Met's Paintings Conservation Department. Students, professionals, and connoisseurs from all over the Northeast and mid-Atlantic attend these lectures. But it just so happens that I've had a cancellation. Not five minutes ago. If you like, I'll sell you the ticket."
"Sell? I thought the lectures were free."
"Oh, no. Not this one. You must be thinking of our public programs. A ticket to a single lecture in this series costs thirty dollars."
"I appreciate the offer, but I can't afford it," Althea admitted, ashamed.
She could feel his gaze on her, and she looked back at his dark eyes and curly, dark hair. "Oh, go ahead, take the ticket," he said. "It's already paid for, anyway."
"Do you mean it?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Why not?"
She didn't hesitate. "Thank you so much. I'm very grateful. I promise I'll listen to every word."
As he handed over the ticket, he announced, "There'll be a test afterwards," with such a perfectly straight face that she was nearly taken in.
The auditorium was almost full; she sensed anticipation as she took a seat at the back. There was a sudden hush as a man entered the stage and stood at the podium. This, apparently, was Mr. Bromley—fiftyish, stocky and square-shouldered, with thinning hair. It was hard for her to make out his features from where she sat in the last row. He spoke with an English accent; his voice was assured, sonorous, cultured.
"This lecture will continue from our lecture last week, about the ravages of time and the sins of previous conservators: 'Irreversible Changes Due to Time,' and 'Irreversible Changes Due to the Mistakes of Previous Conservators.'
"Our function is to care for the pictures—and in the fullest possible sense. A conservator is like a doctor looking at a patient. We should never forget that we're dealing with something alive, and anything we do is a threat to the life of the picture. This idea, that a painting is alive, some people find strange, although it's commonplace in the other interpretive arts. Can you imagine a musician looking on a Bach concerto as something dead, or an actor playing Shakespeare by rote? Our approach is not clinical, however, but one of warmth since we've all come into this field because the pleasure we get out of the visual arts is the greatest thing in our lives."
A murmur of assent rose from the audience. "Paintings are like people," Mr. Bromley continued. "They start to die as soon as they are born."
Althea's attention was riveted by this idea, but she dared not pursue it lest she miss some of the lecture. Mr. Bromley was elaborating, "The paint begins to deteriorate the moment the artist lays down his brushes. The colors start to change and tones alter, one to another. If you look at early Italian and Flemish paintings, you find that the landscapes are always autumnal. You might imagine there is some iconographical reason for this, but actually it's because the greens, which are copper resinate, have oxidized and turned brownish. For a similar reason, in the early religious paintings where the Virgin is depicted, we lose the azure blue of her robe. The color blue had an immense mystique in the Middle Ages but since blue pigment was often azurite—lapis lazuli being too expensive for ordinary use—it gradually oxidized and turned greenish or even black.
"With time and often with misguided treatment, the original values of the picture change markedly. The shadows darken and details become less visible. It's very much like going to a symphony concert and hearing the bass muffled. After four or five hundred years, the changes in paintings are so great that many an artist, if he could see his own work, would be hard pressed to recognize it. The thing to understand is that you can't mummify a painting. Changes occur. There is a built-in death. One has to recognize that, although it is a desperately sad thing, a painting won't last forever."
In spite of her determination to listen, Althea found herself thinking: If painting is such an evanescent art, and my pictures are bound to decay and disintegrate, why have I focussed my hopes on the future? Is it just ignorance, or is it a way not to mind so much my exclusion from the present?
Shrinking from this unhappy thought, she summoned her attention back to the speaker, who was progressing with his other topic, the sins of conservators. "Many restorers in the past destroyed masterpieces. It was just brute force and inexcusable ignorance.
"Among their crimes must be included painting relining. It's a great shame that most old paintings have lost their impasto, or surface relief, almost entirely. That's because, sooner or later, the canvas rots and the painting has to be relined. In the past, the new canvas was stuck to the back of the original with a glue adhesive which hardened after having been pressed with a hot iron. Sometimes the paintings were ironed both front and back, and naturally that crushed the surface.
"There are some other physical ills which restorers try to deal with. One of the most serious things that happens to a painting is what happens to the varnish, which is used to enrich the tonal values and act as a protective film. Varnish lasts an amazingly short time—only twenty or twenty-five years, sometimes as few as fifteen—and then the resin oxidizes and becomes semiopaque. After fifty years, the painting is very much obscured and all the colors are falsified. So you have this appalling thing called the cleaning cycle in which the old varnish is removed and a fresh coat applied. It's an enormously serious operation in which the life of the painting is at stake. Insensitive removal of these oxidized surface coatings often does irreparable damage, and even the most careful work irremediably harms the paint surface. It's an unfortunate fact that the greater the painting, the more it has been damaged by repeated cleanings. Every generation wants to take a fresh look at a masterpiece and so cleaning is frequent. For that reason, second and-third rate paintings tend to outlive the great ones.
"People think of cleaning a painting as the removal of dirt. They think it's either on or off. But a paint surface is much more porous than the layman imagines, and it's nothing to do with dirt. You're taking off an organic layer, like skin."
Althea
felt an increasing dread wash over her as he spoke. How ignorant she was! Unlike the painters of medieval times, who learned their craft during years of apprenticeship, modernism celebrated the visionary artist, the individualist. It occurred to her now that much was lost in valuing artistic self-expression to the exclusion of craft. While restorers today had more knowledge of artists' materials than in the past, it seemed that artists had much less.
Her attention continued to wander. She began to review her mission of finding a gallery to represent her, a mission she had half-heartedly begun with Jeanne at her side for support and which had been interrupted by Paul's accident. But, she remembered, it was this accident that had motivated her to finish the Block Island paintings at last and to go ahead with the search for a dealer. If Paul could be struck down so senselessly, who knows what might happen to me? she'd thought. What am I waiting for? I can't let my fear of rejection keep paralyzing me.
Once she'd made up her mind, she'd been in a rush to get slides of her work, to do everything the way she thought it should be done, only to discover the hard way that once she had the slides, it didn't mean that anyone would ever want to look at them. During the last several days she had spent considerable time going to gallery after gallery, only to be told by a haughty young woman or man her age or younger to leave her slides, which she had stuck in the pockets of a plastic storage sheet, and eventually someone would contact her. Each time Althea had seen her slides being put away without a glance into a drawer or box with lots of other slides.
On Friday afternoon, as she entered the last gallery on her list, the George Clarke Gallery on Greene Street, it seemed to her that all she had done that day was offer her slides to a void. She felt consigned to oblivion. She was determined not to give up the one sheet of slides she had left to the impeccably groomed and snobbish assistant who asked for them. By pure luck- or perhaps fate—Hannah Clarke herself, white-haired and straight as a stick in high heels, happened to come out of her inner sanctum just as Althea was preparing to leave.
"Who is this, Alexis?" Hannah Clarke asked her assistant, as if Althea couldn't speak for herself. Alexis asked Althea her name and then repeated it after her.
"No translation is necessary," Althea said. "We're all speaking English."
Then Hannah Clarke looked at her. A smile broached the elderly woman's imperious face.
"So we are," Hannah Clarke said. Althea heard the trace of an accent she couldn't place. "What do you want?" This time Hannah Clarke questioned Althea directly.
"I want you to look at my slides."
"Lay them down on the light table."
Althea was so unprepared for this response that she didn't react. After Hannah Clarke repeated herself, Althea obeyed her. Feeling that she couldn't bear to watch her slides being examined, she looked away.
After a pause, Hannah Clarke began to question her about the paintings represented in the slides—the Block Island series and five others—and about the rest of her work. Althea tried to answer straightforwardly. Hannah Clarke expressed no opinions. Then she said, "Expect us at your studio on Monday. That's the day the gallery is closed. We'll be there at four p.m. sharp." She turned to the assistant. "Take down the address."
Althea couldn't believe her ears. "What?"
"Do we indeed speak the same language?" Hannah Clarke commented. "I said we'll come by to look at your work next week, on the 15th. I'm usually prompt. I take tea in the late afternoon," she added.
"So do I," Althea replied.
After that she had left the gallery immediately. She was afraid that Hannah Clarke would change her mind.
In the Metropolitan Museum lecture hall, as she relived this surprising interview, Althea even wondered if she'd imagined it. If the gallery takes me on, it'll be like winning a ticket in the lottery, she decided. Absorbed in examining her feelings, she suddenly realized that she'd missed a lot of the lecture, in spite of what she had promised her benefactor with the ticket. It seemed that a change in the speaker's tone of voice had brought her back to the present, and she roused herself in time to hear his final words.
"Essentially I'm a pessimist. Time wins in the end. But that doesn't mean that we have to help it along. I'm continually amazed," Mr. Bromley concluded, "that anything has come down to us at all."
* * *
Althea left the museum with the sense that she was experiencing a change of heart. A lecture which she had attended by sheer accident was causing her to rethink her attitudes towards art, towards her own creations. Most artists, she realized, lived in the present much more than she had. She was thinking of Michelangelo, of his youthful cupid and his mysterious snow sculpture, of his ease at the beginning of his career and his obduracy at the end, when, after having pleased others, he could no longer please himself.
As always, when she reflected on the giants, she felt small in comparison. Tonight, though, the thought was a solace. Obscurity can be a relief, she reflected. Obscurity is not necessarily failure. I wonder if I can manage to please myself and Hannah Clarke.
Outside the museum, it was dark. Althea looked at the lights up and down Fifth Avenue and the streams of lights from cars in swift motion. It seemed to her that she was reentering the flow of her life, which had somehow been stopped inside the museum. She walked quickly down the long flight of steps. On an impulse she paused at the bottom to look back.
The museum seemed to drift and dissolve, a mirage insubstantial as air. Just imagine, she said to herself, all those paintings locked within but not sealed from time, in slow but inevitable deterioration. What, in my ignorance, I had assumed was permanent is actually in flux.
She pictured building, paintings, precious objects disintegrated into dust. As she stood thinking, a father and son passed her. Their exchange flew out to her in the night.
"Why do you like New York City so much?" the boy asked.
"Because everything is here," his father replied.
How strange, Althea thought, that these words should land on me like a gift just as I was imagining a scene of vast destruction, where all trace of what had been is eroded away. Yet she did not feel despair at this barren prospect; in a way it was strangely consoling. What would it matter then, she thought, if once everything was here?
But it was nearly impossible to believe that this great fortress with all its treasures would disappear. No, the Metropolitan would continue to consolidate and conserve its collections; and she, with anxiety and hope, would show Hannah Clarke her paintings on Monday.
Chapter 25
From her apartment, Althea heard a seagull laughing. Involuntarily, she pictured a Block Island scene: a blue sky and a bluer sea, the melancholy tolling of a buoy, the regular crash of the waves, and the call of a circling gull. The vision was so intense that she had to make a conscious effort to realize where she actually was: New York City on the 18th of December. Surely she'd imagined the gull. She pressed her cheek against the cold glass window, peering up at a sliver of gray sky. There it was, a white scrap of a wing, just disappearing.
The Hudson River is tidal here, Althea reminded herself. In New York City it's easy to forget how close you are to the sea.
The thought of Block Island flew away with the gull. New preoccupations came trailing behind. I know I've done the wrong thing, she worried. I better call Jeanne. She's the one who got me into this.
"I have some news," Althea announced, after she and Jeanne had exchanged hellos. "I took slides to some galleries."
"And—"
"Well, it doesn't work exactly as you said," Althea couldn't resist saying, "but anyway, there's a gallery that wants to sell the Block Island paintings."
"That's great. Which gallery?"
"Hannah Clarke from the George Clarke Gallery came Monday afternoon."
"That's a good one, isn't it? I know I've heard of it. Is Hannah George's wife?"
"No, his mother. And quite a termagant, too."
"You don't sound happy, Althea."
"I'm
not."
"Why not? You've got a reputable gallery to represent you. It's what every artist dreams of. You'll get a show, publicity, exposure—what you need to get established, but can't give yourself. They'll arrange it for you."
"But that's just it. I don't think I will get these things. I feel I'm being exploited. I should have just said no. Oh, dear."
"I don't understand. Can you explain?" asked Jeanne.
"There isn't much to explain. Hannah Clarke looked at the slides I brought. She gave me an appointment. She came, saw, and conquered."
"What do you mean?"
"She made an offer to sell the Block Island paintings. I didn't like the offer, but I didn't feel I could refuse. I was intimidated by her. Besides, I'm not in a bargaining position, and she knows it. She left and took my paintings with her. How do I know I'll see them again?" Althea almost wailed.
"But what was the offer?"
"Just what I said—to try to sell the paintings. No show, no publicity, no nothing. She said she had potential buyers in mind. Some rich people, undoubtedly. The paintings will be separated from each other and disappear into private homes, and no one will know about them or see them. I feel like crying. If I could take them back, I would."
"Wait a minute. The paintings aren't even sold yet. You can take them back if you really want to. Aren't you overreacting?"
"I guess so. But if I take them back, that's the end of my relationship with this gallery, and I can't afford to do that, even though it's not what I really want. Once I thought that being taken on by a gallery would mean the end of my struggles. I was so naive. Now I see that being accepted means the beginning of a whole new set of worries and concerns. Do you know what's really strange about me?" Althea confided. "I'm finding it harder to be accepted than rejected, at least when the acceptance doesn't meet my needs."
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