Tomorrow's Vengeance

ELEVEN

‘I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.’

Benedito Mussolini, Speech at the Opening Exhibit of

Il Novecento Italiano, Milan, 1923.

‘BAG’ read the blue-and-white buttons we pinned on our lapels. Someone had not been thinking ahead when they named it the Baltimore Art Gallery.

The eclectic collection was housed in a former high school on Guilford Avenue, not far from Penn Station, in an area called Greenmount West that was emerging, slowly but steadily, from the rubble of the Baltimore riots of 1968. Did you watch the HBO drama, The Wire? Then you’ve been to Greenmount West.

Recently designated as a Maryland Arts and Entertainment District, the area had experienced a renaissance of theaters, cafes, and restaurants as well as an explosion of space for artists to live and work in the sprawling former Crown Cork and Seal factory. Nevertheless, the streets could be a bit dicey, so I was glad I had my posse with me.

‘Elevator or stairs?’ I asked my friends as we entered the spacious lobby of the museum and showed our passes to the attendant.

‘Oh, stairs,’ Izzy said. ‘I need the exercise.’

‘“The new Italian Renaissance,”’ I read aloud from the exhibit brochure as we climbed the marble staircase to the gallery, ‘“was described by Margherita Sarfatti as a ritorno al mestiere, or a return to craft.”’

‘Sarfatti was Mussolini’s mistress,’ Izzy informed us. ‘Awkward for him, because she was Jewish. She ended up fleeing to Argentina, but she returned to Italy sometime after the war and became an influential art critic.’

‘Susan Sarandon played her in the movie,’ Naddie added.

‘What movie?’ Safa wanted to know.

‘Cradle Will Rock.’

I paused on the landing. ‘When I die, please note I want Susan Sarandon to play me in the movie.’

I started up the next flight. ‘Where was I? Uh… “This classicizing moment gave birth to renewed interest in Italian Renaissance painters such as Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca” blah blah blah… “and demonstrates the power of the neoclassical paradigm for postwar Italian modernists”… and so on and so on.’ I closed the brochure and used it to fan myself. ‘Whenever I get to the word “paradigm” my brain shuts down.’

‘“Hegemony” does it for me,’ Naddie confessed. ‘Best to let the works speak for themselves, I always say.’

At the head of the stairs, a huge banner hung from the ceiling – identical to the cover of the brochure – which indicated where the exhibit began. Sixty artists were represented, according to the banner, comprising painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, fashion and the decorative arts, on loan from museums all over the world.

‘I don’t think much of de Chirico’s paintings,’ I commented to my friends as we browsed through the first gallery. ‘He seems to be a one-trick pony.’ De Chirico’s work featured oversized classical heads and weird classical buildings with an oddly distorted perspective that made me tilt my head and say, ‘Huh?’ The foregrounds were often decorated, Dali-esque, with rubber gloves or bananas.

There were the stark, monochromatic still lifes of Morandi, who was fixated on bottles and vases; the abstracts of Balla; the cartoons of Sironi.

‘Now, this is more like it,’ I said as we came to some vibrant, realistic portraits by Federico Andreotti, who posed his models in aristocratic scenes, often wearing eighteenth-century dress.

‘Airs and graces,’ muttered Izzy. ‘My father couldn’t stand Andreotti. Wouldn’t have him in the gallery.’ She dismissed the artist with a wave of her hand, and moved on to a series of paintings by Cagnaccio di San Pietro – a woman applying makeup at a mirror; another of a woman wearing a red dress; an old fisherman; and the little boy with the bubble, the painting that had been featured on the flyer.

‘I’d buy this in a minute,’ I said, indicating La Bolla di Sapone. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

‘Got twelve thousand dollars?’ Naddie wanted to know. ‘That’s what the di San Pietros are going for these days. I looked it up.’

‘Maybe if I’m good, Santa will tuck the painting into my stocking for Christmas,’ I joked.

Izzy and Naddie moved on. The paintings were growing progressively more abstract and, to my way of thinking, less interesting, so Safa and I took a detour to explore the section on decorative arts.

We were leaning over a display case of exquisite porcelain drinking cups by Gio Ponte, one decorated with circus acts and the other with airplanes, when I heard somebody wail. Safa and I exchanged worried glances.

‘That sounds like Izzy,’ I said.

We raced back to the gallery where we’d left Izzy with Naddie. As I turned the corner, barging into a gallery that Safa and I had skipped, I saw Izzy holding onto the doorframe with one hand, pressing the other to her breast. ‘I can’t breathe!’

I guided her to a nearby bench and forced her to sit down on it. ‘Is it your heart?’

‘No, no. My heart’s fine.’

‘You’re hyperventilating, Izzy. Put your head between your knees… that’s right. Now breathe in. Breathe out. That’s it.’

‘I’ll go find some water,’ Safa said, and she disappeared around the corner of the gallery.

I sat down next to my friend, reached out and began stroking her back. ‘Where’s Naddie?’ I asked.

‘Restroom,’ she gasped.

‘In and out,’ I repeated. ‘In and out. Better?’

She nodded, and several silver strands that escaped from her bun trembled around her face.

‘What is it? What happened?’

‘I, I…’ Izzy began.

Safa returned just then, carrying a Styrofoam coffee cup of water. She knelt on the tiles in front of Izzy, her skirt puddling around her. ‘Here, drink this.’

Izzy took the cup in both hands and took a sip, then another, then handed the cup back.

‘Better?’

‘Yes, I think so. It’s just… that painting,’ she said, pointing to a wall of portraits, one of them featuring a young boy kneeling with his arms wrapped around a dog. The animal had thick, curly brown and white fur. His large brown eyes stared out at the viewer, just like those of its pint-sized master.

‘The one of the boy and the Portuguese water dog?’ I asked, just to be certain.

Izzy nodded vigorously, dislodging even more hair from the confines of her bun. ‘It’s not a water dog, Hannah. It’s a Lagotto Romagnolo named Pecorino, and that little boy is my brother.’

Needless to say, lunch at Sofi Crepes was forgotten as we sat in the gallery’s cafeteria over pre-made sandwiches and bottles of designer water in pastel colors, discussing what to do.

While Izzy was a study in anxious indecision, Safa had donned full battle gear, prepared to march up to the gallery’s office and put them on notice that they were in possession of stolen property.

‘That’s no good,’ Izzy complained. ‘They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, we’re soooo sorry, we didn’t know,’ take the portrait off the wall, tape it up in bubblewrap and hand it back to me, are they?’

Safa looked crestfallen but reluctantly agreed. ‘I guess you’re right. We don’t want to give them a head’s up or the painting might disappear.’

Naddie and I concurred, urging caution. ‘You need an attorney,’ I said.

Izzy stared back at me blankly.

‘Do you have a lawyer?’ Naddie asked.

Izzy thought for a moment then shook her head. ‘Only in Pennsylvania, and his specialty was real estate and probate.’

I patted Izzy’s hand. ‘I have a brother-in-law who’s an attorney in Annapolis. He rejoices in the name Malcolm Gaylord Hutchinson, but everyone simply calls him Hutch. Would you like me to call him? If he can’t take the case he will certainly know someone who can.’

Izzy looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. Until then she’d been able to hold her tears in check but suddenly the floodgates opened. ‘Yes, please,’ she sobbed.

Safa grabbed a wad of napkins from a dispenser and tucked them into Izzy’s clenched fist.

Ragazzo con Cane, I thought. Boy with dog. An unassuming title, a modest painting, yet tangible proof of Izzy’s life before the Nazis. It had hit her like a blow to the stomach. Simple oil pigments dabbed onto a rectangle of canvas, yet representative of everything Izzy had lost: her father and mother, her brother, even her country.

Izzy cried until the tears would no longer come, and like good friends we sat there handing her napkins, making comforting noises, and let her.