The Collector

by Scott Wittenburg

Alan spent Saturday afternoon watching the Ohio State Buckeyes crush Illinois then ordered a pizza for dinner. After wolfing down all but two slices of a medium pepperoni with mushrooms, he decided to spend the rest of the evening working on Chris Hammond’s website. He had three more websites waiting in the wings and the sooner he wrapped this one up, the sooner he could get started on the others.

  He was very pleased with how well his website design business had grown and flourished the past year. It was great to see his visual arts major finally starting to pay off since his decision to give up private investigation. The transition to web design had been a natural fit for him since he had always been fairly computer savvy and had spent much of his free time designing websites as favors for friends through the years. Now that he was designing sites for a living, he sometimes found the work tedious and monotonous but still managed to feel a sense of pride whenever one of his sites went live. He always strove to do his very best no matter how banal the material for a site may be. In fact, he realized that his greatest source for inspiration was the challenge of trying to make the ordinary look extraordinary through his design. This was what helped keep his ideas fresh and helped account for his success.

  The biggest perk of his profession was the ability to work at home. Besides being a homebody by nature, working at home kept his overhead minimal since he didn’t have to pay rent for an office. The only tools he needed were a fast computer, internet access, software, a few peripherals and his Nikon DSLR. The only other requirement was his time.

  Alan checked his e-mail, opened iTunes, chose a classic rock playlist to listen to then began work in Dreamweaver. After about a half hour or so he realized that his heart wasn’t into working tonight—something else was on his mind. He switched over to Safari, placed the cursor into the Google search field and typed in Edgar Degas. A second later a page loaded up and he began his research.

  It had been years since his art history classes and he realized how little he had retained while reading Degas’ biography. He had never been a huge fan of impressionism and he held only rudimentary knowledge of the style and movement. He recalled that his professor had spent the bulk of his lecture on the more popular impressionists Renoir and Monet and very little on Degas.

  As he surfed through the various websites, Alan learned that Edgar Degas was the son of a well-to-do banker who lived comfortably most of his long life due to the success of his art. The artist actually despised the term impressionism even though historians consider him an impressionist. What made Degas’ style unique was his attention to composition while capturing the essence of his subjects with quick strokes of his brush. In addition to being a painter, Degas was a draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, photographer and collector.

  Throughout his career, the artist was constantly experimenting with new techniques and seemed determined not to conform to the practices of his contemporaries. In addition to portraiture, landscapes and racetrack scenes, ballet was a favorite theme of his. Besides his penchant for capturing the transitory moves of dance, he often showed the ordinary side of the ballerinas, depicting them in off-guard positions and at awkward moments. It was as though he wanted to downplay the glamour of the dancers in favor of showing them as ordinary human beings.

  Another favorite theme of Degas’ was the depiction of nude women bathers in various stages of everyday routines such as combing out their hair or drying themselves off. None of Degas’ paintings of women were erotic or exploitive in nature. He simply showed women as they appeared in ordinary everyday settings.

  Degas also created more than a hundred wax sculptures of ballerinas and bathing women in addition to horses and jockeys. Yet the only sculpture he ever exhibited publicly in his lifetime was entitled The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. Alan examined the unique bronze and cloth sculpture of a thin adolescent girl and read an excerpt from the listing for the sculpture, currently held by Britain’s Tate Collection:

  The model for this sculpture was a ballet student at the Paris Opéra, where Degas often drew and painted. Degas first made a reddish-brown wax sculpture of her in the nude. Then, aiming for a naturalistic effect, he dressed a three-quarter life-size wax sculpture of her in clothing made of real fabrics - cream-coloured silk for the bodice, tulle and gauze for the tutu, and fabric slippers. He also gave it real hair tied with a ribbon. When the wax sculpture was first exhibited, contemporaries were shocked by the unprecedented realism of the piece. But they were also moved by the work's representation of the pain and stress of ballet training endured by a barely adolescent girl. After Degas' death, his heirs decided in the early 1920s to make bronze casts - nearly thirty of them - of the wax original. In these versions, all is bronze except for the dancer's gauze tutu and silk ribbon. Recent investigation into the casting of this piece has shown how the founders attempted to match the colours and aged appearance of the original wax sculpture, which, by this point, had spent forty years in the artist's studio. Pigmented waxes, ranging in colour from pale orange through pink and brown, were rubbed into the flesh areas. The bodice was painted a cream colour, but a pigmented wax was applied to darken the lower part. The skirt was dipped in a mixture of animal glue and pigment in order to created an aged effect.

  Something about the story behind the famous sculpture intrigued him.

  It also elicited a question that had been in the back of his mind ever since he had received the e-mail from Beth Lindsay the night before—

  Was it be possible that the photographer who had digitally re-created Degas’ style of painting was some kind of fanatic obsessed with the famous artist? Obsessed enough that he felt a desire to emulate the artist’s style and subject matter for some sort of personal gratification?

  As farfetched as it seemed, it was a possibility. After all, why else would somebody take the time and effort to copy someone else’s art so blatantly and shamelessly post it on a website without so much as a credit to the original artwork or even a mention of the original artist? Unless he had some kind of ulterior motive.

  Which might also help explain why Ellen felt her sister was in danger.

  Alan suddenly had an idea. He located a site featuring reproductions of many of Degas’ paintings and bookmarked the page. He then went to his e-mail and clicked on the link to the site posted by the impressionist photographer. He opened the bookmarked site in a new window and began searching for any of Degas’ works that looked similar to the photographer’s images. It didn’t take him very long to locate a painting with four ballerinas wearing blue tutus.

  He resized the window and dragged the image next to the photographed version. It was uncanny. The photograph was a virtual carbon copy of the original painting—right down to the body positions of the girls! Yet, the photograph was clearly just that: a photo that had been manipulated to look impressionistic in a digital imaging program such as Photoshop. Alan could even make an educated guess on what filters and techniques the photographer had used to achieve the final effect. But the genius lay not in the post image effects but in the actual scene that had been shot. The tutus were all the same powder blue, the ribbons around the dancers waists were the exact hues seen in the original and each individual girl’s hairstyle was meticulously duplicated in the photo. Even the components of the scene: the textured yellow/brown floor and walls, the dance bar running along the wall, the wooden doorway and the pillar-type structure looked virtually identical to the original painting!

  But why?

  Why in the world had the photographer taken such pains to recreate this painting?

  Alan continued his search. He eventually found another painting that looked similar: the one of the ballerina sitting on a wooden bench, crouched down fiddling with her slipper. Alan positioned the photo next to the painting and made a startling discovery. The images were virtually identical except that the painting also included a woman in black sitting beside the ballerina. The woman was wearing a hat that hid her eyes and holding a black umbrella in her hand with its tip resti
ng on the floor. The woman seemed oblivious to the dancer and was in fact simply sitting on the bench staring at the floor.

  The photograph however showed only the ballerina on the bench and a barren area where the woman was seated in the painting.

  Whoa—

  Alan ran his hands through his hair and stared at the empty space of the bench in the photo. Why had the photographer omitted the woman? He had been so meticulous recreating all the details in the other painting yet for some reason had entirely omitted a key component in this one. One possible reason was that the he hadn’t had anyone to portray the woman in black so he went ahead and shot the image anyway.

  But that didn’t make any sense.

  Why bother shooting the scene in the first place?

  Who is this guy, anyway? And what the hell is he up to?

  Alan thought about the mysterious Ellen and her sister who had to be saved. Could her sister be the missing older woman and not one of the dancers?

  No, that was preposterous. Therefore—

  One of these girls had to be Ellen’s sister, period.

  Alan searched for paintings resembling the other two photographs but had no luck on this particular site. He returned to the Google results page and clicked on another site that sold Degas reproductions. A moment later he immediately recognized the painting of the ballerina with her back to the viewer staring down at her feet. He dragged the photo and the painting side by side on his screen.

  Another perfect match! In fact, if he didn’t know better he would swear that they were one in the same. The photographer had done that good a job.

  Apparently his skills were improving with time.

  What was amazing in this particular copied work was the fact that it perfectly mirrored the painting, which had a rough unfinished sketched look to it. All four girls wore tutus that were an almost transparent off-white accented with random strokes of powder blue within the folds. Only the rendering of the girl in the foreground had any clear detailing but it still maintained a swiftly sketched look to it. The highlights in the young dancer’s auburn hair were crisp yet the large blue ribbon around her waist was haphazardly colored within a more than obvious pencil sketched outline. The shadow on the floor created by her form was also roughly sketched, not clear.

  The background of the image had an even more unfinished sketched look to it with the stroked lines on the wall and nearly imperceptible details of the other four dancing girls. Alan studied the photo and painting for several minutes, wondering if the photographer had simply copied the original background and pasted it into the photo. But that hadn’t been the case. There was just enough photographic quality and subtle differences that eliminated that possibility.

  Okay, so the guy was very good at what he did. But that didn’t explain his motive. Why would someone hire kids to reenact poses in carbon-copied scenes of a long gone master painter? No one would ever want to buy these copies. Hell, they weren’t even forgeries of paintings but photographed clones of the originals.

  Didn’t make sense.

  And that was driving him crazy.

  Alan took a long look at the final photo and began scouring the site for the original artwork. The photo showed a young ballerina on a dance floor in an arabesque position. He had already noticed several of Degas’ works showing this position in his search but they had all been close-ups of the dancers for the most part. This photo showed the dancer in the middle of a large dancing studio, nearly dwarfed by her placement in the background of the composition. The remainder of the scene consisted of a rather intrusive spiral staircase in the foreground to the left and three floor-to-ceiling windows spaced evenly in the background along the wall of the studio. The ballerina was positioned in front of the center window, facing to the right, standing on her left leg with her right arm outstretched in front of her and her left leg extended straight backward.

  Having no luck on this site, Alan checked out a couple more sites but still couldn’t locate anything that resembled this image. He was about to give up when something suddenly caught his attention. He noticed a spiral staircase on the left side of a painting but the scene was filled with several dancers instead of only one. In addition to the troupe of dancers in the scene there was an elderly woman standing behind one of the dancers in the foreground and an older gentleman standing well off in the background behind her—

  Alan spotted the girl in the arabesque position in the center of the background—looking exactly like the one in the photo right down to the auburn hair and pink ribbon she wore around her waist.

  But she wasn’t alone in the original. There had to be close to a dozen other figures in the painted scene.

  Like the photo with the woman omitted from the bench, this one had practically everything omitted from the original except for the solitary dancer, the three windows and the spiral staircase.

  Was this yet another unfinished project? Or had the photographer opted to eliminate the additional human components of the original in favor of focusing on just this particular dancer?

  Alan studied the original painting carefully, looking for similarities to the photo. The dance studio seen in the photo including the spiral staircase, tall windows, wall color and trim, and wood floor was an exact duplicate of the original painting. Omitted from the original were the old man and lady and a total of ten dancers. At least it appeared to be ten—the details were a bit mottled in the left background of the scene and it was difficult to tell if there were two or three dancers standing there. There were also the legs of a dancer barely visible descending the spiral staircase from the top of the scene.

  Suddenly it dawned on him: How in the hell had the guy recreated this scene so closely? He had to have built the dance studio set from scratch unless he had actually been in the same studio where Degas had created the original painting. That seemed very unlikely. Alan checked the date of the painting: 1873-78. The studio had to have been located somewhere in France too, no doubt. There was a slim chance that the photographer had done his work in France and somehow used the original scene for the shot. But it was highly unlikely.

  So, assuming that he had built the entire set for the scene and then hired girls to model for him just so he could get everything just right, it was more than clear that this guy was a whole lot more than simply obsessed with recreating works by Degas.

  He was totally immersed in it.

  Alan decided to get a beer. After fetching an ice cold Michelob from the fridge he returned to his office and took a long slug. He stared at the images sitting side by side on his monitor and realized that he would never be satisfied until he knew what this guy was up to and if he was indeed keeping Ellen’s sister captive. He had a strange yet almost certain feeling that this was the case. Why he felt that way, he wasn’t sure. Something to do with the sinister nature of the whole situation—the apparent sincerity of the Ellen woman and her desperate, cryptic plea for saving her sister from what appeared to be some sort of madman. The intriguing yet troubling idea that this man was so fanatical about Degas that he would stop at nothing to recreate his art. Someone like that could be very dangerous.

  The problem was that he couldn’t do anything until he heard back from Charlie. If the computer whiz could trace down the URL of the site to a specific locale, it would at least be a start. In the meantime there wasn’t much else to do but sit tight.

  He was about to shut everything down when he suddenly had an idea. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He hurriedly returned to the photographer’s site and placed his cursor at the end of the site’s address in the browser. He then dragged backward until he had selected all but the main site page and hit the delete button, resulting in the address: https://kadanskl.com

  Then he hit the return button, expecting to be taken to the parent/index page of kandanskl.com.

  All he got was a window that read, We are sorry, https://kadanskl.com/ cannot be found.

  Which was really odd because virtually every working website h
ad an index page—the very first page you came to when entering a particular website. Yet this one apparently didn’t have one. The only accessible page appeared to be the photographer’s gallery sub-page.

  What’s up with that? he thought.

  Shit. He would just have to wait for Charlie.