100 Malicious Little Mysteries

Thank You, Mr. Thurston by Ed Dumonte

They all told me, “Mr. Thurston can help you.” When I took my pictures to dealers or collectors or to other artists they all said, “See Mr. Thurston — he will know what to do.”

But how could I? Alone and friendless in the city, I had no influence, no channel of communication, to a man of Mr. Thurston’s stature and importance. I understand this now. But I wasted many weeks sitting in the anteroom of Mr. Thurston’s office. Each morning I rolled up several of my best canvases and went to Mr. Thurston’s office to wait.

“Mr. Thurston sees no one without an appointment,” the girl would tell me. Or “Mr. Thurston will be in conference all day.”

All the mornings and all the afternoons of all the days I waited patiently, hopefully, and I never got so much as a glimpse of Mr. Thurston. At last my money ran out and I had to take my paintings into the streets again — to display on fences and trees.

But I didn’t stop trying to get Mr. Thurston’s attention. Everybody knows that an artist has no chance of getting a showing or any critical attention unless he can win the patronage of some great man. Perhaps, I reasoned, if I couldn’t speak for my paintings, my paintings could speak for me.

Among my best works were scenes of the city, done soon after I arrived, while the city was still fresh and beautiful to me. One of my impressions was a skyline of vertical lines and planes done in shades of gray. Another, painted at the waterfront, interpreted the warehouses as cubes of dingy brown, the river as a parallelogram of polluted blue, the whole surmounted and spanned by arches of rust. These were two of the pictures I rolled into a tube and mailed to Mr. Thurston.

After a week my paintings were returned... unopened. Stuffed into the wrapping was a note: “Mr. Thurston does not examine unsolicited artwork.”

I was almost angered by the note. But when I thought about it, I decided it was reasonable. Mr. Thurston was a great and influential man, his name on every tongue. He must receive thousands of requests for help every week, hundreds of paintings from daubers and Sunday artists. He could hardly be expected to give his valuable time to every unknown artist who called on him.

For a time I puzzled over ways and means of getting to see Mr. Thurston. My problem was solved, I thought, by a prosperous-looking gentleman who one afternoon stopped and examined my street display.

He liked my pictures. They showed depth and feeling, he said. Excellent composition, striking colors. When he asked why I didn’t have a dealer to represent me or a gallery to hang my pictures, I told him, and he understood.

Although he had no influence himself, he said, he had a friend who would be most interested in seeing my work. And he wrote me a letter of introduction to Mr. Thurston.

Was it to be that easy, then?

The next day I brushed my suit, applied a bit of black paint to my shoes, and with two paintings under my arm I went back to Mr. Thurston’s office. I interrupted one of the familiar excuses to give the secretary my letter. She disappeared into the inner office, returned after a few moments, and handed the letter back to me.

“Mr. Thurston has asked me to tell you that he is acquainted with the writer of this letter, and that his personal distaste for the man is exceeded only by his abhorrence for his judgment of art. Under no circumstances would Mr. Thurston consider sponsoring a piece of work recommended by that man.”

As she spoke I flushed with anger; but my anger changed, as I realized what had happened, to my embarrassment and shame. I had been duped, tricked by one of Mr. Thurston’s enemies, cruelly used as a pawn in some hideous joke. I fled from the office and ran blindly back to my room.

I lay for hours on my cot, moaning with anguish as the consequences of what I had done became all too clear to me. Foolishly I had let my name be associated with a man whom Mr. Thurston despised, and forever afterward, though innocent of any offense, my name and my work would be attacked by Mr. Thurston as if I too were his enemy.

All that was left to me was to leave the city, leave my oils and brushes, leave my paintings for the janitor’s boilers, and try to endure somehow the living-death of the world of non-art. But I was not yet free to go.

If I were ever to know peace I must find some way to apologize to Mr. Thurston. Not that he would accept it, for he was a great and important man, and I had offended him beyond endurance. And, too, there was so little I could do. A public apology from a nonentity has no significance. I would gladly have cut off my ear and sent it to him, but he would probably return the package unopened.

The answer came to me in a flash of inspiration. I would do a portrait of Mr. Thurston! — a portrait that would express more clearly than words the respect and admiration I felt for him. A portrait of feeling and sincerity beyond any doubt or question...

I immediately started to work, searching newspaper and magazine files for pictures of Mr. Thurston, rereading his famous articles of criticism and opinion. From these fundamentals of likeness and character I made sketches — ten of fifteen sketches to capture the arch of an eyebrow or the shading of a cheekbone. Forty or fifty sketches to find the proper angle of the head and express the character of the chin. Hundreds of sketches to re-create for all the world to see the soul of this great and influential man.

At last I was satisfied with the sketches, and then slowly, painstakingly, I began to commit to canvas the image I had conceived. For days, without food or rest, I fought with mass and color to put a living man into oil — the massive brow illuminated from within by a brilliant intelligence, the eyes that saw beneath the flat surface of canvas to the heart and soul that gave a painting life, the thin lip that curved into an almost cruel disdain for shoddiness or incompetence, the sweeping line of jaw and chin that bespoke the sensitivity of a true critic and connoisseur...

When the painting was finished, I carried it to Mr. Thurston’s office and left it propped against a chair. Then, wrung dry by exhaustion and the passion of my work, I returned to my room and collapsed into unconsciousness.

I don’t know how much later it was or how it came about, but my next memory is of Mr. Thurston himself standing over me, shaking the portrait in my face and shouting at me.

“I am accustomed to being hounded by every inconsequential dauber in the city,” he said. “If you have been the most persistent, I reasoned that it must be because you were the least talented. When I found this — this atrocity — in my anteroom I saw that I was right.

“I do not make a practice of offering constructive criticism for every smear of paint I see. But since to do so in your case may save me the further annoyance of being exposed to your work, I shall make this exception. My critical opinion is: stop painting! If you must paint, study under the proper teachers and you may one day be capable of designing wallpaper. You will certainly never rise above that level.

“Use your eyes and whatever sense you may have and you will see the truth of what I say. Compare this — this portrait! — with its subject, for example. Do the frontal lobes of my brain really peep through a gap in my forehead? Do my eyes indeed dangle out of their sockets? Have I somehow missed seeing in my mirror what is apparently a third eye? Are the bones of my jaw as badly broken and dislocated as this... this execrable... this heinous... this shocking—”

Mr. Thurston went on. And on and on. But I was no longer capable of understanding what he said. The very core and fiber of my being had been torn apart and shredded, as by some mighty internal explosion. With excruciating pain and blinding light the truth of all that Mr. Thurston said burst upon me.

It was futile to try to express thoughts and emotions with abstract forms, as I had been doing. My pictures had to look like the objects they represented. It was really so simple...

It goes without saying that it was Mr. Thurston’s wise and generous criticism that made my paintings the success they are today. A reporter was with the policemen who broke open the door of my room and his newspaper printed photographs of Mr. Thurston lying beside his portrait. Other reporters, too, were kind in describing the likeness as “uncanny,” “startling,” “an incredible similarity.” Art dealers and collectors have been clamoring for more of my work ever since.

Unfortunately the light here is bad and I am kept too busy shuttling between the courtroom and the doctor’s examinations to continue my painting. So the portrait of Mr. Thurston will probably be my last painting. That’s the opinion of the lawyer assigned to me by the judge; he believes I have only another six weeks or two months left, and I’m too exhausted to complete a major work in that time.

But that’s all right. The portrait is my masterpiece.

Thank you, Mr. Thurston.