Seek My Face (7 page)

“Not propaganda, expression,” mildly objected Mahlon Strunk, who for all his stodgy appearance was a doctrinaire Socialist. “What the Urban Scenists said was there, was there. Poverty, crowding, tenements. Give them that, Bernie.”

Several painters began to object, to be sardonic, but Bernie’s staccato voice, a Bronx native’s undrownable-out voice, cut through them; settling his monocle in place with a lifted eyebrow, and switching his mustache back and forth with a sideways pursing of his lips, he continued haughtily, “Pittsburgh factories, breadlines, long-legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street—face it, it’s all cheap genre painting, Benton and Grant Wood with their bib overalls off. American art has become a picture-postcard factory. Every nation has its commercial artists,” he stated resolutely, seeing that others wished to speak, “but not even the Nazis claim to have made art history with them. Americana doesn’t make good American painting; the American project,” he said, removing his monocle and gesturing with this disembodied emblem of vision, “is to create the conditions out of which great painters—great minds, great
seers
—can emerge. It is time artists refused easy success, refused isolationist-philistine money, repudiated the art dealers and museum directors; it is time we forgot about success.”

This was proclaimed, the last phrases with the drumbeat sonority of President Roosevelt’s high-toned broadcasts, to a group that had known little success. Their paintings—weak, coarse, modest-sized echoes of Miró and Mondrian, with a muddy impasto borrowed from the Mexican muralists—
held yet only the wish for revolutionary action, not the achievement. Jarl Anders, gaunt and pasty, a Minnesota preacher’s child, a humorless shaman, cried out, hoarse with wrath, in the Cedar Tavern of Hope’s recollection, “Swill! Ever since the Armory Show, synthetic tradition and unredeemable corruption! The Armory Show was swill, the spoiled fruit of Western European decadence, dumped on the American yokels with all its labyrinthine evasions, and it’s been total confusion ever since. No shouting about individualism, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate. No literary games and idiotic automatism, no Bauhaus sterilities, no pseudo-religious titles, no obscene toadying to the smooth-tongued agents of social control can rise as high as even the toenail of the sublime.”

“My goodness,” Myrtle Strunk had to exclaim, sitting wedged against her husband. “ ‘The toenail of the sublime’—Jarl, how high would you say you have risen? The ankle? The kneecap?”

“You mean to mock,” he stated, his torso as rigid as the dark near-abstract shaman-figures prominent in his work, “but I will repay your discourtesy with an honest answer. Since 1941—I date the year precisely, as more momentous than any puffed-up events at Pearl Harbor—space and the figure in my canvases have been resolved into a total psychic entity, freeing me from the limitations of each, yet fusing into an instrument bounded only by the limits of my energy and intuition. My feeling of freedom is now absolute and infinitely exhilarating. A
single stroke of paint
, my mocking Myrtle, a single stroke backed by a mind that understands its potency and implications, can restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and
pictorial devices for subjugation. Imagination, no longer fettered by the laws of fear, becomes as one with Vision. The Act, intrinsic and absolute, becomes its meaning and the bearer of its passion.”

Anders’ vatic rapture roused a murmur, and then a clatter, of earthier commentary, including drink orders to the waiter, but all were, Hope felt in the rosy flush of her youth, touched, like a crowd of doubtful churchgoers, by the possibility of any such absolute. Bernie, quick-tongued, a dapper big tout in his suit of small black-and-red checks, cut in, “Roight. The recognizable image—dead. Sensation, plasticity—dead. Beauty is dead: Impressionism began to kill it, the rediscovery of primitive and archaic art finished it off. Beauty and comedy belong to the same Christian lie. Nietzsche said it: ’Truth is ugly.’ He said, ’We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ The only virtue left in this day and age is courage before the hopeless. The only art is one whose symbols will catch the fundamental truth of life, its tragedy. Primitive art is magical because it is shaped by terror. Modern man has his own terror, and we—”

Strunk objected: “There’s more than that, Bernie. There is, as Roger said, everything we feel, including joy. There is a realm within; painting draws it out of us. Our self discovers its laws in what Jarl called the Act.”

Bernie snapped, “Self—a rag doll, a fetish. The painter’s feelings, personality—who cares? Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle—brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter’s mind should be as pure as the scientist’s and the philosopher’s. I call the
process
plasmic:
the purpose of abstract art is to convert color and shape into mental plasma.”

“My God, what pseudo-European swill,” Jarl Anders protested.

Bernie Nova persisted: “The canvas enlists the viewer in sympathetic participation with the artist’s thought. It expresses the mind foremost, and whatever is still sensuous is secondary, an incidental accident. Truth before pleasure.”

Roger Merebien’s luminous round head emerged from a huddle with his bushy-haired girl of the evening. Flutingly his overcultivated voice announced, “I find I ask of the painting process one of two separate experiences. I call one ‘the mode of discovery and invention,’ the other ‘the mode of joy and variation.’ The first embodies my deepest problem, the bitterest struggle, to reject everything I do not feel and believe. The other is when I want to paint for the sheer joy of it. The strain of dealing with the unknown—the absolute—is gone. When I need joy, I find it making free variations on what I have already discovered, what I know to be mine.”

“Just watch it,” warned Bernie, “you don’t get decorative.”

The worst word they could bestow was “decorative.” Zack so dreaded being decorative that he threw dirt and broken glass into his wet canvases; he walked on them in his filthy shoes.

Phil Kaline, a millworker’s son from Detroit who had yet to discover his signature, big paintings in black and white, offered, “Come on, you turds, it’s not about
knowing
, it’s about
giving
. When you’re done giving, the canvas surprises you as much as anybody. For me, it’s free association from start to finish; it’s procedure that leaves a result finally. Sometimes I make preliminary drawings, but the painting
tends to destroy them. Paint never seems to behave the same. It doesn’t dry the same. It doesn’t stay there and look at you the same.”

It hardens
, Hope thought. None of this would be important if paint didn’t harden.

One painter was conspicuous by his silence. His eyes darted from face to face, tawny slitted eyes the raw sienna of dead grass in blond-lashed lids rubbed pinker and pinker as the beers or whiskeys accumulated within him. At times Hope saw him take in breath, or tense his lips as if to speak, but nothing came out, and an affecting look of congestion knotted his face, his forehead. His face had more muscles in it than most. His forehead knotted easily into ridges, and circles of muscle formed dimples beside the creases at the corners of his pensive mouth and in the center of his chin. His head sank a little lower into his shoulders when his numb-looking lips moved forward to engulf a cigarette; he hunched at each puff. He was not old, though older than she by ten years, she guessed. His fairish hair was thin on top and his scalp was tan, and he wore a white T-shirt beneath a scuffed leather jacket which he had taken off, so this image of hers must attach to warm weather, the summer of 1944, when, after D-day, eight-column headlines followed the advance of the invasion and every day brought its hundreds of American deaths. As she had said to Kathryn, it was strange that while all this slaughter was going on and cathedrals and palaces were being bombed they could have been so blithe, so autocratic, so oblivious in their pontifications about the redemptive mission of paint, but so it was: the duty of the living was to live, and the brave and valid part of their lives was painting. At this time she was working through the benign but ponderous influence of Hochmann by doing collages and Oriental-looking black brushwork
like Merebien, who reworked his few images—a rectangular doorway, a row of black ovals like giant beans squeezed in a pod—in a mood of joy and variation, and whose round bland face was sweating amiably in their midst yet on its long child-thin neck also floating above them, willing to be their leader, their theorist. If Hope had ever been attracted to intelligence she would have been attracted to Merebien. But her own father had shown her the limitations of refinement, of well-bred intelligence.

She is not eager to share Zack with Kathryn. She has already shared him with so many inquirers, with the multitude that still look to art to save them. She suppresses her recollection of this night, compounded of many such talky nights, at the Cedar or at Stewart’s Cafeteria or the Waldorf on Sixth Avenue off Eighth Street, at the San Remo or Romany Marie’s on Grove Street, Ratner’s on Delancey or the Jumble Shop at Eighth and MacDougal Streets, nights wherein Zack’s face seemed to yearn toward hers in its bleary puzzlement, which seemed more and more her concern, his face aimed at her and lodged within her inner gallery. “Self,” she repeats, and tells the other woman, “But we—they—didn’t just shout theory at each other; really, that was rare. What did Matisse say, ‘Artists should have their tongues cut out’? Mostly, everybody was burrowing away in their own studio, jealous of everybody else’s imagined successes. When we got together it was to drink and have fun. The Artists Union had dances every Saturday, and I remember going to one of them—a Christmas costume ball, after Ruk had cut out of town, me and this other girl, Cindy Jasinski, I was rooming with on Jones Street—as Hottentots, it would be considered too racist to do now but then there seemed no harm in it, we went as Hottentots, covered in grease and coal dust and big glass
beads and not much else, our hair up in knots with a pretend dog-bone from the pet shop through them, and I felt pretty good about myself—I had a nice tidy little figure then, nothing big or floppy, so I could have been wearing a leotard—until, late in the evening, I looked down and realized all the men dancing with me had rubbed my coal dust off and I was just about naked in the front, except for this little lavender G-string Cindy had produced from the time when she was doing burlesque in Jersey City to support a boyfriend in law school!”

Kathryn blinks. She senses that this image, of Hope nude but for coal dust, is meant to tease her, to taunt her. With a brisk distaste she glances down again into the notes on her lap. “You told
Artforum
in the ’sixties,” she said, “that if you had known how much trouble Zack was going to be—”

Hope can’t let her young self clothed in coal dust and grease and blacking in her hair go. She can still feel the cool air of that upstairs loft washing across her front when she and her partner parted, whoever he had been, dead now no doubt like all the other witnesses of her youth, dead like all who had held her at those sweaty dances in the ’forties, the war outside the windows, beyond the fire escapes, darkening the city in which civilian life yowled on like a party of backyard cats. “Of course it was no big deal, nudity, a lot of us modelled, at least for each other.” She realizes she has fallen a question behind. Something about Zack and trouble. She says, “Anybody could see at a glance how much trouble he was going to be. He would sit there not saying a word, as if he didn’t know the English language, then he would have drunk enough to get his courage up and start shouting ‘Fuck you’ at everybody, things like ‘You’re all pretentious shits’ and ‘Some day all that matters about you will be that you got close enough to me to kiss my hairy ass’
and then mumble and stumble off and go pee in the corner or Peggy’s marble fireplace or anywhere. Zack did a lot of peeing, as anybody who drank like that would, of course. But he did more of it in public than necessary. It was like he was saying, ’I’m not that good with this thing in bed but I sure can pee.’ ”

“Peggy Guggenheim?” Kathryn’s voice grew an anxious little tip when a name came along, a scandalous famous old name, it was rather disappointing to Hope, this susceptibility to celebrity. She would have preferred for Kathryn more of the
je-m’en-foutisme
she imagined for herself at this tender age. Before she possessed it, Hope considered celebrity vulgar, and an affront to the proletariat, whose anonymous dictatorship was coming, once the war cleared the air of plutocrats and princes. Would the air also be cleared of movie stars? They were what the proletariat seemed to care about; they hung over the war-darkened nation like silvery blimps.

“I think so. I forget whose marble fireplace, there was certainly more than one Zack peed in. He was pathetic when he was drunk. He had no gift for alcohol, not like Ruk, who was always aware, always civil. Zack reverted to infancy, this drastic insecurity and megalomania, burbling, showing his penis, doing whatever it took to make himself the center of attention, punching somebody. He liked upsetting a table with all the food on it. He did that to me more than once.” The Thanksgiving feast with his family from California; the gallery party after the
Life
article had come out and celebrity had turned him ugly: the incessant ornate humiliations of those last Long Island years, all her attempts to make a decent home overturned and rebelled against, have unexpectedly affected Hope’s eyes. Old age does that: senility of the ducts. As a young woman
she took pride in never crying, no matter how stung or insulted—in not giving the evil, creaturely, colorful world the satisfaction.

Kathryn’s voice softens, retracts its hard tip, becomes almost idle in its helpful prompting: “It was Herbert Forrest who kept bringing Zack to Peggy’s attention. She didn’t like his work for the longest time.”