The Colorman (5 page)

Gwen grimaced slightly with her back to him. “Karl, you always know just what to say to cheer me up.” She busied herself opening boxes of crackers for the party she was throwing that night.

“Ah, come on, Gwen, if anyone can make the art bubble last, it's you,” he chuckled.

“You're lucky I adore your wife or I don't think we could be friends,” Gwen said in a chipper voice.

“Don't worry, Madam, you may have seen the last of me for a while. I'm off to London—the academy calls.” This was a fellowship they both knew well. A tiny flicker of appreciation of what this meant flitted across Gwen's face, but only Rain caught it.

Gwen set her face into a natural smile and turned it toward Karl. “How wonderful for you.”

Turning her back to him again, Gwen muttered, “How convenient…”

Karl shrugged, finished with his mission, which was simply to let Gwen know this piece of his good fortune. He picked at an hors d'oeuvres platter and left the kitchen, passing John Morton in the doorway. Karl watched the older man enter the kitchen, seeming to want to turn back. But then he appeared to think better of it, choosing the effortless, breezy exit over the awkward double back.

John gave Rain a warm smooch and, passing around Gwen, took her hand and sat down on a kitchen stool just behind her. He played with his wife's hand lightly while the three of them talked, ignoring the dozen or so people out in the living room.

“So Dad, I was thinking about what you said at the opening about artworks and books and I just really don't see it. Unless you're talking about those massive, storytelling, narrative, formal paintings with troops and generals or tableaux…or maybe diptychs, triptychs…”

“No, no, no,” John said. “I'm not talking at all about how they're read, or how they're received…or, or their
literary content
for God's sake. I'm talking about the experience of making the thing. The discovery and the pleasure I'm talking about is the artist's.”

Rain was stopped short by this, realizing that she approached her work acquisitively. She painted what she liked to see, shapes she found appealing and mysterious to look at. She painted like she was shopping.

John watched his daughter and twiddled Gwen's fingers.

“And what will you be doing this fall?” Gwen asked.

Rain sighed and looked away again. “Yup,” she said, gathering up a tray and poking at the crackers on it. “That would be England. That's what the man said, Gwen.”

“He's going. I'm asking YOU.”

“Well, Gwen, we're married—remember that whole thing?”

Gwendolyn took a long, quiet look at Rain. “You come see me on Tuesday,” she said. “We're going to order lunch in and we're going to talk.”

Rain looked past her. “Daddy…what is she up to?”

“Good job tonight, girls,” John Morton said innocently. “The show was fantastic. It looked great.”

“Are you on her side?” Rain asked.

“I don't side. My single priority is happiness. And love. And trust. And another scotch.”

He held out his empty glass.

The storage warehouse of the Museum of Modern Art in Queens was made available to scholars, critics and historians both for viewing art and for reading the impressive collection of papers—not just letters and journals of the artists, but those of important collectors, curators, critics and contributors as well.

Rain had developed the habit of coming along with Karl when he had access to places like this. Even though his paternalistic teacherliness had eased up over the last couple of years, the habit had remained and it was an easy partnering they played out in this space. A nice relief from the progression toward the matched judgmentalism and rebellion they'd begun to develop.

They stood before a great, looming Frank Stella. All neon colors and cartoonish black outlines, it was sculptural and dwarfing. Karl was checking notes, distracted and only glancing at the artwork. Rain was respectful and transfixed.

“It's just so huge,” she said.

Karl closed his eyes to cover an eye-roll. He pinched his brow and said with a sigh, “Very insightful.”

Rain was nicked by his sarcasm, but pressed on nonetheless. “No, I mean he's almost doing something with the sheer size of it. I feel like it's a dare.”

“There's plenty written about Stella,” Karl said impatiently. “I can lend you some Danto if you like.”

“I know that stuff,” Rain defended herself. “It's just occurring to me looking at it. Being swallowed up by it.”

“‘All that
stuff
',” Karl quoted her with clear exasperation. “‘
All that stuff
', yeah…”

Rain was taken aback. “Jesus, you're mean lately.”

Karl let the arm holding his notebook flop against his leg.

“Well how else do you expect an art critic who is about to give a lecture this evening on Derridas and the End of Millennia Politics of the New to respond to a comment like that?” He picked up his prop again, studying it as though in a pantomime. “Honestly, Rainie,” he said, shaking his head rather dramatically.

Rain walked away from him momentarily, then returned to the enormous painting. It was monstrous, bright, jutting out at the viewer aggressively, while the sloppy expressive brushwork and cartoonish forms maintained a degree of humor. It was almost slapstick, on an aggressive scale.

Rain cocked her head. “It's just…I can't articulate what I'm thinking. I'm just not getting it across.”

“Uhm-hmmm.” More note taking. “The most famous novelist of this century for a father and she can't put her thoughts into words,” Karl looked up at her and grinned, happy again. “Poor kid.” He chucked her chin with his notebook.

Rain gave a little crumple, like a slight release on a marionette.

Karl had her back where he felt most comfortable. Rain slightly self-conscious and embarrassed, himself jocular and generous toward her.

“Just keeping you honest,” he said, unable to suppress an enormous smile.

“Okay,” Rain assembled her thoughts. “Okay. It just makes me think about how art…making the physical objects that are art... and then valuing them in the way that we do in museums... It all seems such a stab at immortality. Such a gut response against obliteration.”

“I mean, Stella being important enough to be in the Modern and the Hirschhorn and wherever else—even when he's wrapped up in plastic and shoved into the sub-basement, his work is something formidable. Something somebody is going to have to deal with. Do you see what I mean?”

Karl's smile had shrunk almost imperceptibly. From the inside. “Sure. You're concerned about the janitors around here.” Back came the smile.

“Know what? You're an asshole lately,” Rain turned away from him and started walking toward the door.

Karl laughed. “Now that was articulate,” he said, lunging toward her. “Jeez, what happened to your sense of humor, Rainielee?” Reaching her, Karl gripped her shoulders and jiggled her out through a side door into the next room.

They passed into an enormous gallery in the display area, a room presently filled with a monumental Franz Klein.

Rain stopped in front of it and whispered, “Oh, I adore this. It makes me so jealous.”

Karl's expression turned professional. “Yes, well, your little, sloppy, dark tracks, those are… You keep at those, make a few important ones, flesh out the ideas you've been stabbing at and you'll get your first real show at Shuldenfrei.”

“You think he'd give me a show?” Rain turned. “Really?”

Karl nodded. “Black, scrubby, angsty, maybe a little bigger. A BODY of them and sure…”

“It sounds pathetic, but I really want that, you know?” Rain said. “My own show.”

Karl took her by the shoulders from behind. “Just don't go this big.”

“Are you speaking as an art critic?” she asked playfully.

“I'm speaking as an art critic who has to live with this stuff. You are my Frank Stella…” he intoned, nuzzling her, “and I am that janitor!”

Rain finally joined him laughing.

If you had asked Rain why she switched from representation to abstraction in her artwork, she would have described a process of distillation, a feeling of discovery and fresh attention that the abstractions provided her, and just plain liking the results. She might have even dug around for some theory and history depending on who you were and how much you were aware of the conversation of art and the continuing progression of it through time.

She would never have mentioned her husband's response to her work, never would have acknowledged the extremity of her reaction to him when they first met, particularly since she had excused herself with the fact that she'd alighted upon abstraction just
before
she met him.

Rain had gone directly from college to art school the following September after her graduation. It seemed like something she'd always meant to do. The next step. Her work was good. She had built a decent portfolio in college even though her major was philosophy, not art. She just moved on to the School of Visual Arts after college as though following elementary school with junior high. It was just what happened the next year.

Some of the classes were good, and she was glad to have the opportunity to get in a little bit of art history and theory that she'd missed in college, not having wanted to sully her direct experience of art-making with too much academic tooth-gnashing quite yet. So of course, partly in response to the truly naïve and almost charmingly blind enthusiasm of manifestos like the Futurists (
Number 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. Number 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
), which actually made her feel that she should bring a little more courage and audacity and less irony and sly wit to her art. There had been too much of that rebellion among her peers in school, she thought, it being the basis for all their humor and the way they dealt with each other. In that art-school-mobius-strip kind of logic, Rain took what she knew, inverted it, laid it up against the past, inverted both and then indeed inverted the inversions until she'd emptied content and emotion and the human hand from her work. All this reading and critiquing and looking caused Rain to revisit the whole question of what she'd set about to do with all those brushes and paints and flat surfaces.

What resulted, rather than the very competent and increasingly individualistic portraiture she'd been engaging in previously, was a nesting instinct, hiding the unprotected open portraits she'd produced while in high school and college and painting in utterly unrepresentative feeling-texture and dehumanization. An insectification, if you wil , of her results on canvas. At first she knew that it was a matter of hiding, of trying to be more cagey, more opaque than the slightly vulnerable faces she used to paint. It was during a show called “floors and ceilings” to which Rain had submitted two large works involving a great deal of impasto and encaustic on corner-shaped triptychs, that she caught the eye of the very cultish professor of Post-Modernism. His field was of course the faddish perpetually “new” European philosophy, which was satisfyingly tricky enough to make it the perfect mainstay of art philosophy in academia.

Karl Madlin was thirty, about the same height as Rain. He wore his hair long and bound in back. His tiny, wire-rimmed specs played against the athleticism of his body to sign
intellectual
. He liked to play the nerd with his students and frequently broke into very pleased smiles to reward the most imitative thinking. But he graded hard, which, bad-mommy-style, just deepened his students' attachment.

Having Karl Madlin show up at your group show and spend a lot of time in front of your work was, in that very sealed and particular society of art school, the precise equivalent of stumping the physics professor. It was impressing the unimpressable. And it gave all of Rain's formerly uninterested colleagues a slow, shocked head-turn toward her, metaphorically speaking.

Meeting Rain finally, later in the evening (Rain had fervently avoided that side of the room at the opening), Karl took her hand in his and looked deep into her eyes saying he just wanted to see what was in there. She later thought he might have been high that night, or possibly being sarcastic, or both, even though he smoked very little in the time she knew him. But he invited her along with some of his doctoral students to Cedar Tavern, the famous abstract expressionists' bar, saying that he wanted to see what she soaked up out of the place.

Rain knew, of course, that this Cedar Tavern, while furnished with much of the same worn-out looking furniture and bar as the old place, was actually a few blocks away from the original Cedars where deKooning and his wife fought, where Pollock was banned from the place for tearing down the men's room door, and Kerouac likewise for peeing into an ashtray. But she kept this close to the vest, watching the acolytes fawning desperately and feeling grateful she didn't need to impress Madlin for grades so that she could freely appreciate his unusual manners and sharp mind. There was a lot of studiously relaxed art banter that evening, Rain purposefully opting out of it. The excuse of being an art maker and not an art talker being eagerly swallowed by those theory students who believed artists were rarely regular, living, breathing human beings, but rather historic figures. That is, dead.

Madlin, on the other hand, kept trying to draw out her opinions. Rain knew he was flirting with her, but she couldn't tell whether he was really interested in what she had to say, or was just trying to tease her among all these well-rehearsed, walking art encyclopedias.

“So Rain,” he said, ignoring some or other pithy remark aimed at him by his worshipers, “I want to understand what your piece was saying, why I was so drawn to it.”

“‘Why not try to understand the song of a bird…?'” Rain quoted with an embarrassing directness.