At the Strangers' Gate Read online

  His questions were polite and sharp, sometimes disconcertingly so: If the cave artists were so great, why do we like primitive art that isn’t lifelike at all?…How can you tell the difference between Baroque and Rococo? Wasn’t one sort of all spirals and the other all…If they were so religious, why did they make everything look so sexy? How could you talk about the naturalism of Greek nudes when they didn’t look like anyone you ever saw if you saw them naked? Why did Malevich choose a square—aren’t there squares everywhere? What was the big deal about Picasso’s guitar being an “object in space”? There are lots of objects with space around them. And why did we admire Van Gogh’s self-portraits so much? Wasn’t one more or less like the next? Why weren’t they just, well, an ego trip?

  They were, I realized after a time, a CPA’s questions—exactly what you would get if you merged an accountant with an art historian, in some odd X-Men hybrid. He was probing the fine print, looking for the exemptions, double-checking the ledger. He hated the sloppiness of the sums by which art history was usually rendered. And, I had to admit, an accountant’s questions were good questions to be asking, probably better than an aesthete’s, at least likelier to lead to some significant discovery. If we quantified our assertions, what would be left of their extravagance? All the aesthete could do was aestheticize; the accountant could add.

  And yet being exposed to the sloppy accounting of aestheticism didn’t alienate him from it. “I want to do this. I feel that this is what I ought to do.” It was an impressive display of stubbornness on the part of someone who had rarely shown it in his life. “I think I’ve figured out something,” he told me one day. “What you do is, you read the footnotes. Then you see what books they refer to. Then you get the books. Then you see what books the footnotes in the books refer to. Those are the important books.” Volumes, as they say, could not have told more.

  Maxie’s sentiments led me to feel protective of Larry’s. “Look at Theo,” I said to him, “Theo van Gogh. He was a sort of accountant, really—not an artist or an art critic. But he took care of his brother, and that made him indispensable to art.”

  Larry looked at me dubiously. “My brother’s not a painter in Arles,” he said glumly. “He’s an accountant, too. In Syosset.”

  I saw the issue—one Theo supporting another, one accountant supporting another no less: no unsung heroism there. I still pressed the point.

  “But I don’t mean literally supporting your brother as a painter. I don’t mean it literally; I mean, you know, being part of the whole kind of family of people who help make art happen. Sort of in the support structure.” I smelled the lie even as I spoke it. The “support structure” for art was made up of the hugely wealthy who bought it, and of dealers who wore Armani suits and looked as streamlined as Bauhaus façades, not well-meaning accountants, however fraternal in spirit.

  “I heard about Theo,” he said to me, more tired than triumphant. “He didn’t even get a portrait.” The invisible people were banding together. They might no longer be content to haunt the house. They might decide to storm the castle.

  After I saw the portrait of Theo, Maxie and I went for coffee. (He had tea, I think, with many sugars.) He explained to me that he had been born in Williamsburg but grew up mostly in Brownsville. “I worked as a shoeshine boy, and at a slaughterhouse. But I always wanted to be an artist. I don’t know why. My father made mannequins for Finkelstein’s, on the Lower East Side. My mother designed quilts.

  “Then I got married. If you want to be an artist, you can’t be a family man. Van Gogh, he knew that. So I tried other hobbies. I did ham radio for a while—monitoring the ships.” He snorted his snort, at the pretension of “monitoring” from your basement. “In 1958, I opened a textile brokerage business with my brother. But always at the back of my mind there’s this picture of Van Gogh’s called The Langlois Bridge. I saw it when I was young, you know? So Evelyn, my wife, tells me, Get off the damn radio! Find another hobby! So I took painting classes, and I painted one picture and then another, and now I paint seven days a week, every minute I can take from the business. I’ve painted one thousand two hundred and forty-five pictures. I know the amount for certain, because I number every one.”

  “That’s great, to have a passion like that,” I said, trying to avoid a critical assessment while congratulating him on the intensity of his commitment—a verbal trick that would come in handy over the next decade with painters a lot more famous than Maxie.

  “Why didn’t Vincent paint Theo?” he asked me. I noticed six or seven empty sugar packets.

  That question I thought I should have at least some answer to.

  “I don’t know,” I said at last. “Maybe because he was the invisible man in his life. We all have invisible men somewhere in our lives—people who believe in us but who become so familiar that we just can’t see them. I think that Theo was his invisible man.”

  Maxie paused to consider this for a moment. “Fuck that,” he said finally. Then he coughed slightly and leaned forward.

  “What do you think my painting’s worth?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” I said. Of course I had heard him, but needed a moment to think of what to say.

  “What’s it worth? My portrait of Theo van Gogh? To a museum like yours.”

  Like mine! I realized that he thought that my lunchtime presence was a sign of my authority at the museum. If you talked up the goods, you must buy and sell the goods. It was a natural conclusion for a garment factor to make. I was being courted, I realized, not for my wit but for my access.

  “What’s it worth?”

  I realized that his was the same mistake I had made thinking that somebody who knew Art Garfunkel could sell Art Garfunkel a song. The space between the top rung and the bottom rung in New York is smaller than you might think—cats look at kings all the time, interns talk for auteurs—but the separations’ being small doesn’t make them any less separate. Rungs remain rungs. Cats are cats and kings are kings, and kings buy what’s on the castle walls and cats don’t even get a vote. A cat may look at a king—may even talk to the king more freely than you might imagine. But the king won’t let the cat decide what to spend on pictures. That’s the king’s business.

  The best answer would have been, of course, “Try to be realistic. It really isn’t the sort of thing any museum would ever buy.” But we are all too cowardly to say such things, or too courteous. Or maybe courtesy and cowardice are one in the end. (The people in Paris who didn’t fight duels with D’Artagnan were courteous because they were afraid of his edge.)

  “It’s priceless,” I said at last.

  I thought that the sententious baldness of the response might be seen through instantly, as Vincent had seen through Theo.

  But Maxie seemed to find it satisfactory.

  “Yeah. I know,” he said, “I’ll never sell it. Someday I’ll have my own museum—not outside, but with walls and all that crap—and I’ll put it there.”

  I smiled. The portrait of Theo was still there four or five years later, when I visited him again, at the same street fair.

  When the museum acquired Vincent’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin, I went with Maxie to look at it. He wasn’t crazy about it.

  “The eyes don’t follow you,” he said, taking it in one lunchtime. “That’s bad. That beard is good. It’s the color in the curlicues that makes the beard stand out. Van Gogh is a colorist. Me, I’m an accentuist. I accentuate the lines.” He walked around. “Look at it from over here! From over here he’s got a sneer! Why should a mailman be sneering at anybody?” He looked some more. Finally, he said, “You know what, this picture is a big disappointment. Those two big yellow buttons on his coat—your eye goes right for them, so you don’t see his face. Also, the way those three flowers in the background [on the wallpaper pattern, he meant] crowd the beard. And—that smirk! Give me the Langlois Bridge anytime! Give me the Road with Cypresses! Actually, my portrait of Theo is a better portrait than this portrait. You know, looking
at this picture and thinking about Theo reminds me of a time when my brother Harry was in his shorts, delivering some goods, and a postman got right in his way. Harry said to the mailman, ‘Get out of my way!’ The postman just stands there. So Harry slugs the postman! It’s funny how this picture reminds me of that story.”

  It seemed like a fair interpretation, or at least as fair as any other. It struck me that the thing that made the picture sublime to many of its highbrow viewers—the dignity that Vincent gives to a “simple” postman—was exactly what bugged him about it. He hated mailmen. They were timeservers. They got in the way of hard-charging factors making their deliveries.

  Years went by, and eventually I wrote something about Maxie, and then lost touch with him. Not long ago, when he came to mind again, I did what no one could have done thirty years ago—I Googled him. I was stunned—no, I was astonished, I plotzed—to find out that Maxie Schacknow’s museum, makeshift arrangement of the art fairs, had, in the end, actually come to exist. A now defunct but still live page showed that there had been a Maxie museum in Florida, the Schacknow Museum of Fine Arts on 7080 Northwest Fourth Street in Fort Lauderdale—the same sad town where my grandparents had gone to “retire” and die.

  There was still a “mission statement” with a photograph of the museum: “The purpose of SMOFA is to provide a venue for artists, some well known and some obscure, to share their work with the community. The Museum was founded by Max Schacknow, a self-taught, Brooklyn, New York born artist, who realized how difficult it was for unknown artists to showcase their talent.”

  He had done it after all. He had made a museum with walls to show his pictures in. The portrait of Theo must have emigrated there.

  There was even a review that sounded as though a younger version of me might have written it. “And how credible is a similarly photocopied brochure soliciting membership in the museum when it can’t even get the names of some of the best-known artists in history right? Of the six membership categories named for those artists, only two—Picasso and Renoir—are spelled correctly. Would you want to shell out $75 for a ‘Reubens’ membership (does it include a sandwich?), $500 for a ‘Rembrant,’ or $1000 for a ‘MichaelAngelo’? The Schacknow Museum of Fine Arts is a fine idea, but unless Max Schacknow starts paying attention to the details or hires someone to do it for him, he’ll never have a first-class museum.” That was Maxie’s museum, for certain.

  So he had been a millionaire! Small potatoes by New York art-world standards, but a big enough benefactor to bully and entice art professionals in art-starved retiree Florida. He had become an anecdote I told, but I had missed the range and power of his vision. He had not only painted this picture, he had built a museum to hang it in, and had then died with his work intact. He had done what Vincent dreamed of doing

  Then, about six years ago, in 2011, a Dutch art historian discovered that a self-portrait of Vincent that had been in the Amsterdam museum for years was, in fact, a portrait of Theo! He had painted a portrait of his brother after all. It had existed all along! I felt a small, regressive, smug triumph: they had been looking at the labels, and it had been a mistake. It was hidden in plain sight, and the reason it had been accepted for a century as a self-portrait was that, though distinguishable from Vincent by a set of infinitesimal clues that took a century and more to put together—the slightly blonder color of Theo’s beard; the turn of Theo’s ears—Theo had been made otherwise indistinguishable from Vincent. The actual portrait, unidentified for so long, was of a man who bled into his brother’s image—or was, perhaps, trapped in his brother’s shadow. An invisible man, even in his own portrait.

  As always, what was really there to look at was what was always there to be seen. The mysteries of art are on the surface, open to the eye—because that’s where the mysteries of life are, too. Sibling love and sibling rivalry, the needlepoint Guernica and the portrait of Theo—any attempt to mystify the pictures with occult symbols or buried allegories missed the source of their actual emotional power, which is right there to be seen if we are willing to look past the labels. I had not been wrong about that, even if my saying it had been shamelessly designed to draw a crowd.

  There was, I think, some strange moral equation of ambition and absurdity and self-obsession, of self-assertion and self-denial, in the intersection of Maxie’s and Vincent’s and Theo’s ambition with my own. They provoked in me an act of moral and aesthetic accounting that I still seem unable to conclude. (Larry might have done it.) There was some tangle of truths about ambition and art that I could just detect within this comedy of unfulfilled aspirations on Fifty-third Street. My own ambitions were quickly gratified by the instant sugar high of attention in the gallery, no matter whose it was. But attention was what everyone wanted, whether a genius like Vincent painting or Maxie copying him or merely me, talking, or Larry copying me. However small or sad the act, the ambition was always the same, and it was nothing so grand as to be “understood” much less advance the history of art—it was simply to have people listen and look. Reading Vincent’s letters, we’re stunned by his simplicity and his devotion—but, God, he wishes people would pay attention.

  Maxie was absurd, certainly, to think that he could be Van Gogh—but, then, to everyone but Theo, Vincent had been absurd to think that he could be Van Gogh. The pieties of humanism often cover up the brutalities of ego. Maxie’s portrait of Theo looked like a picture painted by Maxie because it was dutifully selfless, a catalogue of Theo’s traits and treasures. Vincent’s actual portrait of Theo looked like…Vincent, because Vincent, being an artist above all, was, above all, occupied with the mystery of himself. His brother was entirely hidden within his own face, under his own hat. Beneath the pieties of art lie the brutalities of talent. It really is all in how good you potchke up the paint. Paintings are a series of egotistical assertions, rooms in Maxie’s museum. Some of them turn out, by a strange architectural alchemy of the self we call art, to be places where we all can live.

  Art begins in paying close attention to the one thing outside ourselves that we believe most resembles ourselves—to a face, or a flower, or even someone else’s portraits. But ambition is simpler: all we really want is not to have passed this way without notice. The same impulse that got me talking at lunchtime without an audience listening made that other art-lover work with a needlepoint over his Guernica and had Maxie building a little museum with his name on it, and all the artists’ names misspelled.

  At least I was learning something real. The history of art looked more human than the art history books allowed, and ambition had more pathos in it than they allowed, either. Don’t let me leave here trackless and alone, is all we plead for with fate, and ambition is a reflection of that panic. Ambition became art when we learned to be willing to defer the immediacy of the attention in order to make it count for more later. That’s what Vincent had believed, anyway. But it was a challenge to this lunchtime tumler, and would always remain so.

  Talking at MoMA at least made me realize that the only thing I would ever be good at was spinning tales, telling stories. I would never be a real critic, much less an “iconographer,” a scholar of Renaissance pictures. My allegiance was to the excitement of the moment, the interchange between speaker and picture and audience, not the interchange between the picture and history. I was going to have to get out of art history one way or another and, somehow, find a place in the world of writing, some place where what was wanted was words, even silly words, in the one right order, even if it meant becoming in the end that terrible thing, a writer of labels.

  Oh, and Larry? Years later, rummaging through art magazines, I was startled to see what I took to be his name on a paper, duly footnoted, about—Tatlin, was it? There is always something frightening about seeing one’s own name in print unexpectedly—it always has the look of an indictment. My heart stopped when I saw that I was referenced, at the end and dismissively, for something I’d written: “Gopnik here makes the error” or “Gopnik sneers at…” It wa
s the eternal exchange between writers and scholars, between people who are here to tell tales and the ones who are out to find facts. He had become my story. But I had become his footnote.

  6

  The Simple Logic of Summer Shirts

  After I was fired from the Frick, and then discovered that the pleasures of talking about art at MoMA, though real, were not very lucrative, I decided to look for a real, a paying, job. (We were officially still in love with the Blue Room, but, unofficially, both ready for a better, or at least a bigger, home.) I found a job quickly, through a school friend. It was at Gentlemen’s Quarterly, at that time not yet exclusively called GQ, and still exclusively a men’s clothing-and-grooming magazine. They needed someone to edit the fashion pages, and, my qualifications for this job being exactly zero, I got it.

  In those days, the back and forth between real jobs and sort-of jobs was freer-flowing than it is now. People advanced. They started as fiction editors at Mademoiselle, as the beverage editor at Esquire, and next time you turned around they were running a publishing house. To be in print was an astounding thing in itself; to control print, to be an editor, even of trivia, was to have power—as if in today’s terms there were only fifty or so computers with Internet access in the whole city, and the ability to post was limited to those who owned them and would let you use the keyboard for an hour or two. The fiction editor of Playboy was a significant person; the movie reviewer of the Soho News was, too. The copyeditor of GQ was not exactly on their level. But he was a citizen of the inner city.

  On her series, Girls, I was, as I’ve said, startled to see Lena Dunham’s Hannah—having landed a job, of exactly the same station, at exactly the same men’s fashion magazine—indignant at its limitations, and for a half-second I felt generationally censorious: didn’t these kids today know how lucky they were? The entitlement! But, then, Hannah, I realized, was terrified of getting stuck there—once a regular paycheck arrived, she thought, they had put a flowerpot over your head, and it was pointless to struggle. (There were several other would-be poets and essayists placed in that office, trapped alongside her.) In the eighties, fluidity of opportunity made up for absurdity of occupation. You did a silly job, but having jobs was not in itself silly—one led to a better one. Now twenty-somethings feel impaled upon their first jobs. We felt…impelled—impelled upward, however illusory that feeling may have been. One day you were serving hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party; a few months later you had a contract with Gordon Lish for a collection of your short stories at Knopf. Things like that happened. After you had the contract it might dawn on you that there was more money to be made per hour handing out tuna tartare on crispy crackers than publishing short stories. But the path from the crackers to fame seemed short. Nowadays the path from obscurity to ubiquity is instantaneous—you just write something nasty or nice on social media. But the ubiquity turns out—and here’s the joke they didn’t tell you, the punch line they forgot to share—to be not very different at all from complete obscurity. Everybody’s speaking at once.