Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (4 page)

He still misses the old workshop on Piazza di San Giovanni. It fills him with pride—which has given rise to several admissions at the confessional—that he, Paolo Uccello, son of a barber-surgeon, ran a workshop on the main square of Florence. It’s a year since he surrendered the lease, and as much as he misses the workshop, he misses his daily walk along Via della Scala, across the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and along Via dei Banchi and Via dei Cerretani. He always took the same route. The fixed routine helped him to trample the spiky irritations he felt most mornings, caused by the minor drama of an oversleeping servant, a reminder from his wife to pay a bill, a slipped roof tile in the night, a dead chick in the courtyard causing Antonia to cry . . . household trivia. With each steady stride from Via della Scala, his responsibilities and distractions seemed to diminish, so that by the time he reached the workshop, he was no longer someone’s husband, someone’s father. Just Paolo.

There was no point in keeping the workshop, he tells himself. It would be an affectation. How could he call himself an artist if there were no assistants, no patrons, no commissions? He’d be a pretender, stalking those cavernous rooms. But whatever anyone says, the work he’s doing now is no less considered for being unpaid.

As the bell rings out from Santa Maria Novella at midday, the servant girl brings to Paolo’s study a wooden plate with spiced beef and polenta. He eats his meal alone at his table, another routine that frees his mind. A line drawing hangs on the wall facing him—a copy he made of Donatello’s
Miracle of the Repentant Son
, the original being a bronze relief for the high altar of Sant’Antonio in Padua. Paolo hung the drawing in his study many years ago as an act of humility—he felt he should remind himself daily that for all his achievements, it was this image that changed the course of his professional life. In tribute, Paolo knowingly borrowed Donatello’s composition and applied it to his fresco of
The Flood
. He decides he must explain all this to Antonia, as she, too, must always acknowledge an inspiration clearly sent by God.

He drains his glass. It’s not an everyday glass; it’s a gift from a Venetian client, and the outer surface is decorated with enamel and gilt. He’s determined to use this gift every day, while he’s well enough and strong enough not to drop it. As his fingers trace the enamel relief, he wonders, were he to die in his sleep this afternoon, would it be so bad? After a long life, with two children surviving infancy? Donato is on the verge of adulthood, after all, and Antonia . . . Well, whatever life brings her, which might be less than he hopes, she must simply offer it up to God.

He pushes himself out of his chair and gathers up Antonia’s latest sketches of Clara, their cook. He decides that Antonia should start a portrait of her mother. She knows how to handle egg tempera, though she’s had precious little practice. He’ll have to push her—she must learn quickly, before she leaves this household.

How he wishes for her sake she’d been a boy. He admits, with regret, that if fatherhood had come to him earlier, even in his middle years, he’d have found little time for the girl, if he’d noticed her at all. A late fatherhood was a precious gift, doubly so with Antonia, who was born after two years’ resurgence of plague and who had survived her own brush with that deadly disease. God surely has plans for the girl.

CHAPTER FOUR

London, 2113

Aurelia Tett, project head for the Gauguin reassessment team, has a larger-than-average cubicle. It’s so spartan that Toniah decides the woman’s not an academic, though she knows she shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Tett is engrossed in a projected spreadsheet, so Toniah knocks, in the absence of a door, on the cubicle wall.

“Ms. Tett, I’ve been asked to see you by Elodie Maingey . . . I’m Toniah Stone.”

Tett turns her head away from the spreadsheet, but her gaze, and attention, only follow a couple of seconds later.

“Oh?” She retracts her thoughts. “Ah! About Gauguin?”

“Yes.”

“Tremendous. Welcome to the Academy. Take a seat.” She casts another glance to the spreadsheet, highlights three cells and blinks off the projection. “And it’s Aurelia.”

“Thank you. But . . . Aurelia, French modernism isn’t my area. I mean, naturally, I know the essentials, but I haven’t researched late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century art since my undergraduate days.” Aurelia gives a dismissive wave, but Toniah is insistent. “My area is fifteenth-century Italian—the quattrocento. Are you sure you want me involved?”

“It’s good experience for you—to see the end result of a long-term investigation.”

“So it’s primarily a training exercise?”

“In part. There’s something in it for us, too. We generally have at least one beta reader who is disinterested, before we go to our academic referees. These papers can create quite a commotion, so it’s best if we prune out any ambiguous statements. That’s where you can help. Indicate any areas of confusion. Insert comments and questions. Also, anything that sounds too contentious from a generalist’s point of view. We’ll take it from there.”

“Will my comments be anonymized? I don’t want to irritate any staffers—I’m scarcely a month into the job.”

“Send your comments to me. My eyes only.”

“I think it’s only fair to tell you what I’ve already told Elodie—that I can’t see how Gauguin can be demoted.”

“Oh, really, Toniah. That’s not the spirit.”

“His Polynesian paintings . . . they established primitivism as
the thing
. Picasso took it further, granted, but Gauguin was recognized in his own lifetime. I mean, if you asked any gallerygoer—”

“Any reputation is a fabrication. Believe me,” Aurelia says. Toniah frowns at the condescension. “Surely, you’ve already seen how it works within academia? A young researcher—yourself, for example, Toniah—writes a paper that’s published in a fairly obscure journal, and then a key academic, a serious influencer, picks up on a single observation you’ve made because it bolsters some minor point in her research, and
later
she includes a reference to
your
paper in the tiniest of footnotes in a triple-A-rated journal.”

She’s on a roll. “Then other academics feel obliged to credit your paper, probably without even reading it, simply because the key influencer has considered it worthy.” She smiles sweetly. Another condescension. “Success is a sticky material; it traps new successes. And, of course, it’s the same for artists, in any era. If you were an artist, Toniah, success would depend on . . . let’s see—which curator becomes a fan, if that curator gains advancement, which reviewer writes about your work, how many mentions you score in zines and five-star-impact conversations. And
then
who buys your work, who off-loads your work, which public galleries exhibit your work.”

“But in my own area, in the early Renaissance—”

“Same thing, different waypoints. Any would-be artist had to be apprenticed to a master artist. How did that happen? Family connections, of course. And those connections also landed important church commissions.”

“I accept that. But it’s the work that matters. If the Academy is presenting Gauguin as an unsavoury character, I have to tell you that I don’t think that approach is defensible.”

Aurelia smooths her hair as though stalling. “We don’t need to do that, Toniah. He stole his ideas. Read the report. It’s in your inbox already.”

The rest of her day is as familiar as any day in her old postgraduate office: she stares at a display hour upon hour, reading, highlighting, tagging. But this new office environment is a slick corporate equivalent of her old shared office space. She’s doing her best to subvert the new straight-line aesthetic. Already, she has thrown off her cardigan—it lies in a heap at the entrance to her cubicle—and she has kicked off her shoes. They lie where they landed, cross toed.

When she first arrived at the Academy of Restitution, she resisted the unspoken intimation that she’d arrived among the anointed ones. The tokens are all there. She has her own desk instead of hot-desking at the university. She has a pass for the department kitchen, with its neatly stocked snacks and shining glassware. There’s a free in-building sports centre, a jogging track on the roof and a free nursery—not that she needs one. From day one, she has kept her ego tightly tucked in. However, she does hope the Academy makes good on its promise of well-funded research trips. It was so bloody annoying she didn’t get the trip to Florence last April—such a missed opportunity.

A few pages into the Gauguin report, she gleans the overall approach to this particular piece of revisionist art history, and she feels itchy. They’re digging into his relationship with another male painter, Émile Bernard, twenty years his junior—both were members of the famous artists’ colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany during the 1880s. While a painters’ colony by the seaside sounds idyllic to an early twenty-second-century mind-set, Toniah knows the reality—a hand-to-mouth existence, freezing cold lodgings in winter, paintings often bartered for food and beer. She has always been surprised that bar owners back then were prepared to accept what must have seemed like slapdash daubings, often on poor-quality supports—even on hessian sacking. All experimental. Why would a bar owner do a swap?

Maybe Gauguin et al. refined their sales pitches in these bar-room negotiations, to the point where they could convince anyone that their artistic quest was genuine and heartfelt, that their search for something raw, emotional and unleashed was a worthy cause and would be recognized, eventually.
If not this year, then next
—she can almost hear Gauguin’s voice. But he, as much as anyone in the group, struggled to move beyond impressionism—the most tame and polite of revolutions in her view. She agrees with the report that these Pont-Aven artists
all
flailed around until Émile Bernard demonstrated a flash of genius—
Breton Women in the Meadow
. And how many people have even heard of him?

Toniah pulls up the painting. Supposedly, it depicts local women at the Feast of Penitence, but it actually looks like a bunch of women having a picnic. She remembers, with a thrilling stab in her chest, how this small painting arrested her, in spite of the crowds, on her first visit to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. She’s sure she made a line drawing in her student sketchbook. She’ll try to dig it out at the weekend. It’s probably in the attic.

She wonders if Bernard
and only Bernard
—with his training as a stained glass maker—could have made this leap: abandoning perspective, simplifying the women’s forms, painting heavy black outlines around flat colour—twentieth-century cartoonish to a modern eye—with the squishiness of paint to satisfy an aesthete’s eye. It was a short step, a decade later, for Maurice Denis to announce the briefest of manifestos: modern painters must remember that a painting is a flat surface with colours arranged in a certain order.

By lunchtime, Toniah has skimmed through the full report. She’ll make detailed comments later, but for now, while the material is fresh, she writes three sentences—one to encapsulate the main message and two to record her initial gut instinct:

Gauguin purloined the breakthrough of his younger collaborator and took the credit for forging a new path away from both realism and impressionism.

Gauguin was incapable of making the breakthrough. Without Bernard, he’d have faffed around with impressionism for many more years.

The Academy’s argument will stand or fall in front of the paintings. The paintings are all that matter, and she’ll look at them after lunch. She creates a new project and downloads the images:

Bernard’s
Breton Women in the Meadow
.

Gauguin’s
The Vision after the Sermon
.

Bernard’s
Christ in Gethsemane
.

Gauguin’s
Christ in the Garden of Olives
.

She’s pleased the report doesn’t demolish Gauguin’s character. If it took that approach, the team would be attacked for its prurience. Everyone knows he abandoned his wife and children and cleared off to the South Seas to paint images of Polynesian women. Somewhere along the line, he contracted syphilis. But you can’t damn him for his promiscuity without damning most of the male population at that time.

Syphilis—the focus of so much panic as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth. Infected men bringing syphilis home to their wives and children, infants losing their eyesight. Toniah recalls the 1916 black-and-white photograph by Paul Strand of the ragged, blind beggar woman in New York, staring without seeing to the left of the camera lens, with a handwritten “BLIND” notice hung around her neck. Was her blindness an inheritance? Toniah can no longer look at the photograph without this question in mind.

Poor old Émile Bernard, she thinks. He didn’t help his own case. He abandoned his experiments. He retreated into realist painting and set off to Cairo to produce mediocre depictions of concubines and harems. He knew Gauguin had recognized his breakthrough and run with it, gained the recognition. Bernard must have been seriously pissed off.

There’s one perk of working for the Academy of Restitution that Toniah would hate to give up—the rooftop jogging track. Not only because it frees up her evenings for slobbier pursuits. She’ll never tire of the views across the city, along the Thames; and to the north, where the Thames basin rises to Hampstead Heath; and to the south, to Crystal Palace.

She loves this release from close reading. Her steady jog, unconscious and uncomplicated, allows her to think more freely, less attached to the facts, about an alpha male artist working in his garret—no exaggeration—whom, she suspects, if she were ever to travel back in time, she would actually find annoyingly attractive. She can’t imagine Bernard would be fanciable. Plainly, it’s irrelevant, but, she reckons, progress sometimes requires a measure of ruthlessness, and that kind of drive in a person has its attractions.

When does that happen? she asks herself. A true professional friendship—a mutual master-and-pupil relationship—as enjoyed by Gauguin and Bernard. How does that healthy, supportive competition transform into a dash for the finishing line? Something fired in Gauguin’s brain, and he sprinted. Was there a moment when Bernard realized he had lost?

Toniah stops and sees her more ambitious alter ego racing ahead.

Gauguin’s killer instinct seems alien to her. Her priorities have always been quite simple—to pay her own way, to be independent, to have an interesting job, in that order. That’s the way she was raised; it’s the partho way.

She walks to the edge of the track and leans on the railing. She’s niggled by Aurelia’s remark about sticky success. Is it truly a matter of luck? And what if her greatest achievement, her own place in the canon of art history, is one day contained in a mere footnote? A seven-point Times New Roman acknowledgment for a life’s work.

And what does it matter?