Theft: A Love Story

43

I have never been able to look at paintings with another human being—everyone else too superficial, too solemn, too impatient, too slow. But now Marlene Leibovitz and I moved around MoMA like partners in a waltz. She was the angel. I was the pig, drunk, endlessly enquiring, staring at Cezanne's Lestaque, finally understanding—at my age—that Braque had no sense of humour, getting myself in a tussle with a fucking fourteen-yearold who was willfully obstructing my view of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

"Shoosh," said Marlene. "Leave him. He's a baby."

My competitor was a tall pimply boy with a safety pin in his tiny girly ear. I will not say I hated him exactly, but it broke my heart, to think how it might be to stand inside his stinky shoes, to know this masterpiece at fourteen years of age, or argue with it, and do it all as easily as I had once walked along the dull footpath from the shop, up Gell Street, to the sale yards on Lerderderg Street.

"I know," she said, although I had not spoken, and for this alone I would have worshipped her, but my God—the shape of her face, the bones, the slightly narrowed eyes, the taut lovely funny upper lip.

"How did you shrink the Leibovitz?"

She kissed me in reply.

Did I like New York? I loved her. If she had been with me every day, I doubt I would have picked up the ink sticks, but the business of the Leibovitz dragged on. So when my genius little thief went out like a pooka playing tricks, I put on my twentydollar coat and took my ink sticks and sketchpad, first down the block onto Canal Street, then on to Chinatown, East Broadway, then the deep charcoal shadows beneath the Manhattan Bridge, and from there to an awful place beneath the FDR at 21st Street, the undercarriage of a crashed machine, abandoned, scabs of rust and concrete falling as I worked.

There were many other places I might have gone to draw, but I did not really question why I drifted further and further from the streets and places I celebrated with Marlene. Now it's clear enough to me—the city scared the shit out of my small-town soul, and it was this that pushed me on and on, a ridiculous effort to somehow conquer, to "get on top of it", a quixotic quest that finally took me out to Tremont on the D train where I became, it seems, the only human figure on all that cruel Cross Bronx Expressway. And it was here that the 48th Precinct coppers found me, just before the George Washington Bridge itself, just at the moment where the huge Macks and Kenilworths shift down a gear before descending into the storming bolted belly of the beast itself.

"Get in the fucking car you fucking fuck," is what the nice policeman said.

As Milton Hesse later told me, I was lucky they did not take me to Bellevue rather than the subway station. I never showed Milt the drawings, but there seems little doubt that they would not have saved me from Bellevue for they were black and dense as soot on a hurricane lamp, a rubbed and broken carapace of dark around the struggling light. These works are very bloody good, but they would have been so much less if I had bought the "right" materials. As it was, the notebook pages were too small, the paper too fragile for my constant erasures and, on more than one occasion, I wore clear through the stressed-out surface. As is true so often, it was the limitation of the materials that made the art, and they are so filled with a wild ugly sort of struggle which was only made bigger when, finally on Mercer Street, I patched A over B, and joined A to C, and so on. Anticipating this last stage I had rode the train down to the Village, my hands as black as a coal miner's, eyes cold and mad in my overactive face.

Marlene could see exactly what I had done. You see that is one reason I could always trust her. When she stood in front of art with me, she told the truth. It was Marlene who not only went to New York Central Supplies for more material but arranged—a birthday gift—to borrow two of my paintings back from Mr.

Mauri.

Neither of us could have foretold the consequences, but the result was that she, with my complete agreement, could bring people to see my work.

This turned out to be a dreadful idea, because the minute I, the Speaker and If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die were tacked to the wall they could be variously patronised and misunderstood by all sorts of idiots who thought the future of art was being charted by, say, Tom Wesselmann, for fuck's sake.

Their assumption was I had come to New York City to make my name, that I had arrived at the centre of the universe and so I must want to suck up to a gallery, get a show, meet Frank Stella or Lichtenstein. Nothing could have made me feel worse.

It is, in any case, a ridiculous proposition, to arrive at thirtyseven years of age. It simply can't be done.

Of course I went to a party now and then, an opening at Castelli, Mary Boone, Paula Cooper. I finally even met the raging Milton Hesse, the first time to be bored by his letter from Leibovitz, the second so he could see my work. What a fool I was. Even now I am embarrassed to remember how, in front of I, the Speaker, he began to tell the story of a fight he had with Guston in 1958. I waited very patiently for him to connect this to his judgment of my work. But in the end it was no more than an association of words and he had no interest in anything to do with me.

The argument with Guston, he said, had been tape-recorded at the artists' club. He wondered—turning his broad and slightly hunched back on the painting—did Marlene possibly have a moment to type it up for him.

And of course I was—just generally—provincial and not up to date, and a part of me was very bloody impressed to sit at Da Silvano and see Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli eating liver and onions at the next table, and if I were as impressed as any hick could be, my reaction was no help to Lichtenstein's art which is already moving rapidly towards deaccession, i. e. the point at which curators begin to quietly dump their worst excesses.

New York, it is believed below 96th Street, brings out the best in artists, but I cannot say that worked for me. Partly, of course, I was jealous. I knew what it felt like to be Lichtenstein in Sydney, but I could never be Lichtenstein in New York. I was a no-one.

I went to Elaine's like a tourist and meekly accepted my table by the kitchen. All this I had expected. Why would it be otherwise?

My error was, for a moment, believing that I might possibly be wrong and then permitting the dealers to look at 7, the Speaker, to see their eyes glaze over, to realise they had never wanted to see it anyway, that they had come because they wanted something from Marlene. Yet, even that particular mortification should not be exaggerated. Artists are used to humiliation. We start with it and we are always ready to return to real failure, the shitty bottom of the barrel, the destruction of our talent by alcohol or misery. We live with the knowledge that, alongside Cezanne or Picasso, we are no-one, were always no-one, will be forgotten before we are in the ground.

Shame, doubt, self-loathing, all this we eat for breakfast every day. What I could not stand, what really, completely, made my teeth curl was seeing the complete certainty of total mediocrities when confronted with—let's call it "art".

For the very same people who cast their glazed eyes on my canvas were often at the auctions at Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips. And that's when something snapped, when I finally understood, not only their dull complacent certainty but their lack of any fucking eye at all.

I went, one freezing February day, to Sotheby's. They had two Legers, lots twenty-five and twenty-eight. The first painted in 1912 had six pages of supporting documentation which basically contained reproductions of really good Legers which Sotheby's had once sold for a lot of money. These two were shit. These sold for eight hundred thousand dollars. That was the real problem with New York for me. That eight hundred thousand dollars. How can you know how much to pay if you don't know what it's worth?

There was also a de Chirico, II grande metafisico, 1917, 4i34" x 2jV%", ex-Albert Barnes, a deaccessioned work. Did anyone think, for a bloody nanosecond, why it might be being deaccessioned? Authentic pre-1918 de Chiricos are rare as hen's teeth. Italian art dealers used to say the Maestro's bed was six feet off the ground, to hold all the "early work" he kept "discovering". But suddenly this pile of crap was real? It was worth three million? It made me ill. Not so much the dirty money, but the complete lack of discrimination, the fashion frenzy. De Chirico is in. Renoir is out. Van Gogh is hot. Van Gogh has peaked. I wished I could kill the fucks, I really did.

It was just after this that Olivier finally signed the certificate. I did not enquire as to what had taken all the time, did not ask what acts of kindness were offered, what deal was struck, but my suspicion was that the poor neurasthenic darling had wrinkled his nose and then taken a dirty big slice of pie. Of course he could do whatever he wished, it was not my business. He could be the nursemaid to my brother and be the author of Hugh's hostile eyes. He could steal old Slow Bones from me, if that is what he wished.

Marlene and I stayed on at Mercer Street. At first I understood this as an economy—why not? It was free—so it took a while to understand that we were hiding. We did have a kind of social life whereby I, by agreement, kept away from dealers, but we made good friends with restorers, authenticators, and one wonderful man, Sol Greene, a tiny little fellow, who ran a family paint business on 15th Street. How much nicer it was to discuss the curious history of, say, madder red, than listen to the drama of the latest Sotheby's circus.

Marlene was scratching around trying to free up some Leibovitzes—there was a collector waiting—but our best days were really just spent walking. Then, in the early days of autumn, we began to rent cars, and trawl through junk shops and deceased estates along the Hudson. I won't say it was not interesting to look at America this way, and it was on one of these trips, in a musty barn in Rhinecliff, that I found a mediocre canvas with the perfectly legible inscription— Dominique Broussard, 1944. It was a coarse synthetic cubist work, the type of object you might easily find on a weekend drive from Melbourne—heavy black lines, slabs of sloppy colour—an order of misunderstanding you probably see in Russia too, but hardly at 157 rue de Rennes.

The barn had an earth floor and the canvas was leaning against the wall. It was not art, was less than art. It had been there so long you could feel all the damp of Rhinecliff in its frame, but there was a way in which this neglect was unwarranted for it was as precious as the droppings of a termite until now thought to be extinct.

I spat and rubbed away a little dirt and what I saw then made me laugh because one could so clearly see her character. She was a thief—she had stolen her boss's paint and canvas. She had no sense of colour—in her hands the Leibovitz palette was gaudy.

She was complacent.

One could imagine her head held to one side as she admired her own brush moving like a poisonous snake through summer grass. She had no wrist, no attack, no taste, no talent.

She was, in short, disgusting.

If this revulsion seems cruel or excessive, it was absolutely nothing compared to Marlene's.

"No," she said. "No way are you going to buy this."

I laughed. I did not understand her, had no real sense of the degree to which she was still defending Olivier against his mother. Of course she knew the enemy's brushstrokes, but never had she seen an original work and here was laid bare the complete and awful lack, not only of talent, but of anything at all. Finally grasping the great nothing, Marlene, so she told me later, was physically ill.

In perfect ignorance, I took the canvas into the little office which was set up like a shed within the barn. A pleasant greyhaired woman was watching football on television, her swollen legs exposed to an electric heater.

"How much?"

She looked over the top of her glasses. "You're an artist?"

"Yes, I am."

"Three hundred."

"It's shit," said Marlene.

"It's our history, babe."

"I'll burn the fucking thing," said Marlene, "if you even try to bring it home."

The woman looked at Marlene with interest. "Two hundred," she said evenly. "It's an oil original."

I had, as it happened, exactly two hundred. So I ended up getting it for a hundred and eighty-five dollars, plus tax.

"You folks married?"

"No."

"Sure sounds like you're married."

She wrote her receipt slowly, and by the time she had wrapped my purchase in newspaper Marlene had walked out to the car.

"Now you go buy her something pretty," the woman said.

I promised that I would, and then drove my lover back to New York City—the Taconic, then the Saw Mill—sixty minutes in icy silence.