At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  There were “wholesalers” from the garment district not far from there; grandmothers who made it their habit to come twice a week, as they had been doing since they were young. Almost invariably, Matisse’s Tabletop was those gentle ladies’ favorite picture, and I worked up a sweet, short eulogy to it, which got me fine cred with the over-seventy crowd—what might now be called my base, since it has remained enthusiastic. (My son, Luke, twenty-odd years later, insists to this day that he never feels comfortable coming to a reading of mine without a defibrillator.)

  There were more aggressive attendees, though. There was, for instance, the man with the needlepoint Guernica. Not long before, the real Guernica, Picasso’s legendary protest picture, had been repatriated, as the painter had wanted, to a newly democratic Spain.

  He came up to me after my talk on Ma Jolie, that strange, dark, rooftops-of-Paris painting, with its stenciled title meaning “my pretty one,” and that I had managed to make sound as if it had been painted by Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse.

  “It’s hard for me to keep coming back here,” he said provocatively, and then waited for me to take the bait.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Why?” I said, being constitutionally unable not to take bait when it’s offered, even if the hook looks bright and shiny and sharp, just beyond the wriggling worm.

  “They betrayed us when they handed over the Guernica,” he said.

  “I think they sort of had to hand it over. The deal was that when Spain became a democracy…” I said, trying to spout what I imagined was the company line without starting a fight.

  “Spain’s a democracy?” he said. The question didn’t take considering.

  “They didn’t have to move it,” he continued to insist before he paused. “But I’m doing something about it. I’m reproducing it, and my Guernica’s in full color.”

  He went on to explain that his “passion in life” was making needlepoint reproductions of Picasso paintings from the museum, working from his own photographs. He was a burly little guy with a spade beard and a thinning hairline. He came back, again and again—once or twice, he actually brought his little needlepoint frame, on which he worked as I spoke. It wasn’t rude, just diligent.

  He kept inviting me over to see his needlepoints. This sounded to me a little suspicious, so, failing that, he actually brought photographs of them to show me one lunch hour. Like some old-fashioned pornographer exhibiting his choicest postcards, he took me into a corner to reveal his “album” of needlepoints—photographs slipped under plastic—with a mix of guardedness and pride, making it plain to would-be gawking passersby that they weren’t invited to this party.

  He had colorized all the pictures as he turned them into embroidery. The Cubist Ma Jolie was done in a sort of ecru, “to show the forms better”; the Girl Before a Mirror, originally in the reds and yellows of a Spanish medieval apocalypse, had been given a tasteful turn in blue and mauve pastels. She seemed…homier than she had before. The Guernica, which occupied a two-page spread, was remade in a sort of ocher-and-lime harmony. It stood out from the rest. It actually looked pretty good in ocher and lime, about as good as it did in black and white. (It was both an homage to Picasso and a critique of Picasso’s failures as a colorist.)

  What was odd and interesting was that, whether purposefully or not, it was, in its way, a “camp” enterprise—an ocher-and-lime Guernica—that made you laugh because it undermined the pretensions of a certain kind of high modernism. But it wasn’t presented as a parody—and God knows its creator didn’t think of it that way. It had the form of a joke, but you weren’t meant to laugh at it, not even with the ironic smirk that might have greeted a Lichtenstein pop art cartoon painting. It was a completely sincere form of unintentionally parodic self-expression.

  If I had been more prescient than I am, I might have seen the needlepoint Guernica as the first small domino to fall—or the first blade of crabgrass to invade the lawn—signaling the appearance of a new kind of art in the 1980s, in which all the older kinds of camp and parody got played as straight as Hamlet or as, well, the Guernica. Though I didn’t know him yet, a young man of a similar spirit was working not far from me, at the MoMA membership desk; within five years, Jeff Koons would be presenting life-size Italian ceramic figurines of cartoon characters with the same mix of desperate sincerity and bizarre bad taste as the needlepoint Guernica. But I didn’t know that then. (Neither did my Guernica guy, of course. He possessed the sensibility by, so to speak, anticipatory accident, rather than guile. But, then, you might have said the same about Koons. In fact, later on I did.)

  There were others like him, lots of them, more of them than you might have imagined: people whose connection to the pictures in the museum was visceral, eccentric, and all-encompassing, religious in that other, deeper sense—part of a search for self-definition rather than for admission to any kind of club of in-the-knows. The folk culture of modernism in New York, I was learning, was stronger and more original than the professional culture of modernism, which seemed merely expert and religious. The high culture was filled with icons and priests and competing theologies. The folk culture was filled with amulets and shamans and superstitions.

  They came to the Museum of Modern Art, every day, or almost every day, at lunchtime, and what they wanted was not a sense of history unfolding in synoptic fashion, with Cézanne nudging the Cubists, who in turn nudged the Futurists, who nudged the next movement, one long row of dominoes falling in curatorial order. No, they came because they were convinced that these strange pictures, these distorted faces and abstract planes and unreal landscapes, were not windows into a form of experience stranger than any they were normally allowed access to, but were windows onto experience that looked like their own in its very strangeness. They lived the pictures as parts of their lives, just as intently and fully as the burghers in Siena and the merchants in Florence had once lived their altarpieces. They didn’t understand that they were supposed to feel alienated from the work. Why should they? They had been looking at it their whole lives. It didn’t feel alien. It felt familiar. The only history it belonged to was their own. They had made a kind of imaginative leap past the apparent difficulty of the pictures, which had seemed so formidable to a popular audience when they were first exhibited, to see the pictures’ difficulty as no more difficult than life already was—they were at home with strangeness, because, after all, the strangeness outside the museum was likely to be stranger and more alienating than any a painter could conjure up. The oddity inside was downright comforting.

  They did not grasp, as I would try to do tumidly in lectures, that the girls dancing in Matisse’s La Danse were cartoonlike forms subversively designed to flatten the robust Rubensian bodies of illusionistic art, that these were not women but ciphers merely standing for women. They saw only girls dancing, and if they were girls in outline, well, what else would you expect in a picture? Stylization they took for granted. Everything they saw was stylized. What was new and inspiring was Matisse’s personal struggle to make his stylizations ring in the world. Their idea of Matisse’s The Red Studio was our Blue Room to the nth. It was a place dreamt up to compensate for what life was like outside it. They saw modern art romantically, instead of academically, and I was beginning to suspect that this was the way the people who made it had seen it, too.

  Martha came a few times to listen to me. She remained busy with her own version of the same kind of job, sort of, organizing D. A. Pennebaker’s vast trove of outtakes, thirty years’ worth, for which the great documentary filmmaker had vague Utopian plans. It had fallen on Martha, ten months into her filmmaking career, to achieve them all. She both loved the sudden, unexpected proximity to the heart of the documentary film world in New York—and was slightly alarmed that, though she had just arrived at the heart, anyone would expect her to, so to speak, crack open the chest and perform surgery.

  This, though, is the truth of New York life. The intern becomes the authority with staggering suddenness,
if things fall out that way. The master or mistress hires an assistant almost absentmindedly, desperately, and the assistant accrues power with amazing speed, since the one thing she can do is limit the overflow that led to her hiring. She liked to run away from her other internship, at the Museum of Broadcasting, and come to the modern museum at lunchtime to hear me speak, though she would often start crying—not racking sobs exactly, but tears all the same—just as I started speaking. Afterward, she assured me that this was only because she was emotionally so invested in my performances, so concerned that I do well. I wondered if there wasn’t some sort of oblique censure registered in the act. (Even now, when I am speaking in public, if I look into the first row I see her lovely slanted eyes dissolved in tears. She still makes the same assurance, and I still have the same doubts.)

  But two of these passionate listeners stood out from all the rest, and they were Larry and Maxie.

  Larry came first. He was a tall string bean of a guy, in his late twenties, in a bad stiff suit. I noticed him standing at the back of the group once, and then again, and then the following Tuesday again. The next time, he gathered up his courage and came up to talk.

  “I really enjoy hearing you,” he said. “Tell me, where could I go learn to talk about pictures the way you do?”

  Knowing my younger self, I’m sure I was a little miffed at first. “You could take art courses at the Met or somewhere,” I said vaguely.

  “No, I mean, where could I go to become an art historian. That’s what you are, right?”

  “Studying to become one,” I said, in the tone of a rustic: “Right hopin’ to be so, sir.”

  “I have a whole lyrical, aesthetic side that I can’t express,” he said bluntly, with an impressive amount of honestly delivered pain. “I’m an accountant. It’s hard to be lyrical when you’re an accountant.”

  I saw that this was probably true, and I immediately felt protective of him. Or maybe I felt competitive? Larry wanted to be an art historian. It seemed to me the last thing in the world any sane person should want to be. But reluctantly, I became his mentor—his Bill Rubin. I brought him a catalogue of night-school courses at Hunter College, and instructed him on how to discriminate among them. I wondered if the chain went on this way, bluster educating the half-baked and mesmerizing the innocent—was this in fact the germ line of education? Was it possible that each of us was imitating the next most visible guy, with no actual person at the center, no real authority, just the long chain of mimicry?

  I did the best I could:

  “Look,” I said, “you enjoy coming here to listen to me and to look at the pictures, and that’s the last thing you’ll find yourself doing if you become an art historian. Keep this feeling pure—let it be the pure thing you have.”

  “You have no idea how terrible it is to be a certified public accountant,” he said. He was trying to be amusing, but he was also entirely serious—almost angry with my complacent, patronizing counsel. “I did it to please my mother, but I want to do something better.” He caught himself slightly, not wanting, I realized, to lose my good opinion, or mentorship, through an undue display of rebellion.

  So I helped him enroll in a class at Hunter—the kind that we called “Pyramids to Pollock,” an overview of man and art from first to last act. He seemed happy.

  Maxie Schacknow was a more ornery kind. He came to hear me speak about Vincent van Gogh. He stood scowling in the back.

  “You didn’t mention the picture he didn’t paint,” he heckled.

  “Well, he painted all kinds of pictures,” I said.

  “Fuck that. There was one picture he never painted.” He waited for me to name it and then, despairing of penetrating the kind of thick skull that was by now familiar to him, went on. “He never painted a portrait of Theo! He painted his mother. He painted the goddamn berceuse”—he meant the woman on a rocker, imagining, I guess, that a berceuse was a job, not a song. “He painted the goddamn postman, for Chrissake!” He was enraged about that, in particular: he meant Joseph Roulin, whom Van Gogh did indeed paint, and in his uniform, too, several times. “But Theo, his brother, lives for him and supports him and cares for him when he’s sick—and no portrait.”

  “I think they were never together long enough once he arrived—”

  “Bullshit,” Maxie blurted. “I mean, excuse my French, but that’s bullshit. He just never saw that he should. Van Gogh was a great artist—but a terrible brother.”

  “Well, many great artists are poor family men—” I began.

  “Family man? That’s how you treat your wife and your children? How you treat your brother? That’s not a man. Terrible brother.” His eyes gleamed. “That’s why I’m doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m painting a portrait of Theo. It’s the picture he should have painted, and I’m painting it for him. In his style, of course. I wouldn’t do it in any other style. I mean, a Monet? No. A Degas of Theo? Of course not. A Vincent of Theo. A Van Gogh of Van Gogh. I’m working on it now.”

  I suppose I edged away, just a little. There were a fair proportion—not many, but some—of outright crazies who came on weekdays at lunchtime. It cost too much to just come in out of the rain, so to speak, but not that much if you had a few dollars (nowadays it’s twenty, or some Disneyland-worthy admission, but then it was much less). Still, he didn’t look crazy. He looked like a guy in the garment business who painted Van Goghs on Sundays.

  Maxie asked me to come and see him exhibit at a street fair, down on Washington Square. It was a crowded show, with acres of the kind of painting that I had been raised to have contempt for.

  What was odd was that, removed from the halls of MoMA, he was clearly something of a star among the Sunday painters. The others—I will never forget an adorable landscape painter with the dream painter’s name, Honey Ruskin—deferred to him every bit as much as we deferred to Rubin. I sensed that the truth of the “marginal” was that the margins were so broad that once you were in them you no longer recognized them as the margins. The “margins” for the marginalized looked like the mainland, with the mainstream merely a horizon in the distance.

  A sign above his paintings announced that none of the paintings were for sale. People went back and forth, admiring the pictures. One woman asked him the price of a Road with Cypresses.

  “That’s a Van Gogh, lady!” Maxie said, rising from his director’s chair. “Offer me ten million and we’ll talk. What’s the price of a Van Gogh! The nerve.”

  She withered away. By the end of the decade, even ten million for a Van Gogh would seem absurdly cheap. By the end of the decade, ten million for a Maxie might not have seemed absurd. But we were only on the verge of the explosion, and not quite there. When I interviewed him five years later, all his imaginary prices had gone up accordingly.

  “You look like an educated group. You remind me of my son. He won a twenty-thousand-dollar scholarship to college. From his father. Come look at the pictures.” We were alike in spirit, I thought, tumlers of art.

  At last I saw his portrait of Theo—though I can no longer recall whether I saw it then or at a subsequent street fair in Washington Square. His Theo was a black-and-white sketch for the painting. It was, of course, a pastiche of many elements in other Van Gogh portraits, less “skillful” than audacious. There were irises behind his head, as I recall, but made to look like iris-patterned wallpaper. Vincent’s patina of heavy brushstrokes became a sort of toothpaste-tube application of raw paint. Theo’s face had been carefully traced from a photograph, and, though daubed with flesh-colored pigment, it looked oddly photographic—a Chuck Close face peering out from a wrinkled, surging expressionist background. Its sincerity was absolute. The background came from one of Vincent’s self-portraits in Arles. But Theo’s forehead was higher and his brow was smooth.

  “That’s deliberate,” Maxie said, following my eye. “I didn’t wanna potchke up the paint there. I didn’t potchke up the paint because I wanted to show what a mensch
Theo was. What a brother. If you potchke up the paint, the way Vincent did with the postman’s beard, it makes it look watery, you know what I mean, like the beard’s on fire or going somewhere. You don’t potchke, you got a rock.”

  The other painters came round to admire Maxie’s pictures and accept his strictures. One of the things I was learning in New York was the insuperable rule of the rabbit hole. If you go into an academic art studio, filled with plaster casts, you expect to find the classically minded artists embattled and bitter. But they aren’t. There are too many of them to be embattled. What they are mostly is amused, the absurdity of the avant-garde establishment being too obvious to them to need much criticism. In return, the avant-garde establishment can’t be angered by the Beaux Arts–minded artists. “The realists, like the poor, are always with us,” one of the wittiest of the avant-garde magi said to me once. Numbers insulate, and in a city of eight million enterprising artists, there are always so many of every kind that no kind seems marginal to itself. I met a man who taught students to paint frescoes in the classic Tuscan manner. He was preoccupied with rumors that another émigré Tuscan might be opening his own fresco studio. A Don Quixote in New York is chiefly annoyed at some other, overread knight who might be muscling in on his windmills.

  Meanwhile, Larry the CPA was pursuing the class at Hunter. “If it’s Tuesday, this must be the Rococo.” It was that kind of class, the kind of thing that graduate students were expected to teach, having been taught by people who also taught them contempt for it. But Larry wasn’t contemptuous of it. He didn’t find it shallow, or reductive.

  He would arrive every week with a set of questions, queries. I would see him waiting to ask them, at the edge of the crowd—perhaps no longer really listening, I thought, feeling mildly hurt, eager to show that he had been promoted into a different relationship with the speaker.