Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (42 page)

Nathan Crémieux had attended most of the exhibitions at the other galleries. He was acquainted with the owners and understood that visionary native portrayals were not considered suitable with the exhibitions of other avant-garde artists. The general conception of native visionary art had not been widely promoted in Paris. Nathan envisioned that native art would be exhibited with other avant-garde art as a course of nature at galleries in Paris.

Nathan introduced us to the gallery owners at exhibitions, and we met most of the avant-garde artists. Aloysius was reserved and only rarely talked about blue ravens at exhibitions. We were both evasive about native culture and the politics of federal reservations. My brother was courteous to other artists, of course, but mostly he only wanted to meet Marc Chagall.

Nathan in fact solicited an invitation for us to visit Chagall in his new studio at 110 Avenue d'Orléans near the Métro at Porte d'Orléans. The entrance to the six-story building was under arched windows. We walked through huge double doors into a private courtyard. Nathan told me later that the very same address had once been used by Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Board of the Central Committee of the Democratic Labor Party in Paris.

Chagall would be anxious and cautious, we were told, but he was rather genial and compassionate, and embraced us as artists, not as curious natives. His eyes were bright and playful, almost gestures of innocence. Marc spoke mostly in Russian, and at times in hesitant French, and yet we seemed to be united with the artist in our own uncertain French.

Chagall was almost as shy as my brother was reserved, but the two painters immediately engaged in mutual ideas about visionary art, the natural motion of color, and the notions of ethereal and evasive representations. Nathan translated the lively discussion with the assistance of Bella Chagall.

Aloysius considered each painting that was mounted in the studio, and turned with the rhythm of the marvelous visionary scenes, a natural sway
and stay of contours. He was moved by the stately colors and motion of the figures. Then my brother turned once more and told several stories about his early inspiration to create blue ravens of liberty. He rarely talked to anyone about his portrayals, but he was captivated by the vitality of the art in the studio and by the generous spirit of Chagall.

Bella Chagall was precise, spirited, and warmhearted, and she closely watched my brother as he moved around the studio from one picture to the next. He paused, moved closer, turned, and then raised his hands to celebrate the genius of
The Birthday
. I praised the very same painting, and was excited to see the original with the painter in his own studio.
The Blue Horses
,
The Poet Reclining
,
Praying Jew
,
I and the Village
, and other paintings were mounted and stacked against the back wall of the studio. Ida Chagall, the only child of Marc and Bella, was eight years old that summer, and she pretended to smoke a white candy cigarette.

I changed the painterly tone of the moment with celebratory and ironic stories about the trader Odysseus Young, the healer Misaabe, and Animosh, the boy shaman of the woodland, and the great mongrel detectors of disease on the reservation. Chagall listened closely and then laughed when the meaning of the words shaman and mongrel diagnostician were translated,
chaman indien
,
chien bâtard
, into French.

Nathan continued the stories about his relatives the traders who had established an ethical union with natives on pueblos and reservations in the Southwest of the United States. The stories about the early traders were always compelling, and the visual scenes were interrelated with generations of other traders and the connection and collection of native art at the Galerie Crémieux in Paris.

Chagall told several stories about the great theaters in Russia, circus clowns, the natural tease and dance of horses, and the nostalgic wisps of visionary scenes in the window mirrors of passenger trains. Aloysius was touched with the poetic ideas and insights of the artist, the actual perceptions of presence, of shadows and motion, and the intensity of his reflections on visionary art. I reminisced about that critical moment fifteen years earlier when my brother had sensed the extent of various perspectives and dimensions of images reflected in the window of an art gallery in Minneapolis.

Chagall paused, turned toward his daughter, and declared that he had
always aspired to paint “an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head.” Bella translated the declaration of aspiration and earthly art several times that afternoon to be certain that we had clearly perceived the concepts of terrestrial and artistic passion, but not wholly sensual.

I pointed out, however, that the head and the mind were both ethereal and earthly. Painters were sensuous poets, and the traces of literary images and painterly scenes were derived as they have always been from the very same mysterious passions of evolution and native stories of presence, chance, and trickery.

Aloysius mentioned his new portrayals of
mutilés de guerre
, the painted masks, broken faces, blue ravens, statues, and bridges over the River Seine. Chagall was moved by the images of blue ravens, and by the abstract depictions of wounded soldiers and the war. He was silent, tearful, and turned suddenly toward his wife and daughter. Bella indicated that her husband was always troubled by the images of war, and the terrible misery, waste, and mutilation of land, face, spirit, heart, and memory.

Chagall could have indicted states and empires, associations and communities for atrocities against Jews. He was an artist of fury, compassion, and religious ceremonies, but never painted the figures of fascism. Aloysius repeated the very same words,
terre
,
visage humain
,
esprit
,
coeur
,
mémoire
, and then he embraced the word
liberté
three times.

My brother had decided earlier not to present a scene of blue ravens as a gift to Chagall. He was there only to appreciate the brilliance of the artist, and not to solicit comments on the abstract motion of blue ravens, wounded soldiers, and the River Seine.

Nathan formally invited Marc, Bella, and Ida to the exhibition of the new blue raven
mutilés de guerre
series, and at the same time to celebrate the publication of my selected war stories, on Saturday, October 25, at the Galerie Crémieux.

Corbeaux Bleus
Les Mutilés de Guerre
Nouvelles Peintures
Par Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu
et
Le Retour à la France
Histoires de Guerre
Par Basile Hudon Beaulieu
Samedi 25 Octobre 1924

GALERIE CRÉMIEUX

Blue ravens were the solemn prefects of the
mutilés de guerre
on the River Seine. The wounded soldiers gathered overnight in ghostly camps on the bloody shores of the
zone rouge
tributaries to warn the successors and to search for the strays. The sunrise and seasons were diverted by the war, and the rivers became the steady stream of death. Broken bodies, shards of mighty country bones, and the tow of unnamed heads, hands, and bloated shoulders in uniform ran ashore in the heavy rain.

The rivers nurtured no secure memories of the dead soldiers, only fragments afloat with thousands of other reflections. Yet the faces of warriors looked back forever with a natural radiance. The Somme, Meuse, Marne, Aisne, Oise, and Seine River have carried for many generations the blue bones of soldiers out to the stormy sea.

Aloysius painted twenty original blue raven scenes of statues, monuments, fountains, camouflage masks, broken bones, hideous faces, and the
mutilés de guerre
on the River Seine. The portrayals were painted for the exhibition at the gallery. The perspectives and style were distinctive, and not the same as the first series of blue ravens and bridges.

My brother was swayed more by native ledger artists and hide painters than by the geometric creations of cubist painters. The faces and contours were fractured, turned back on the wily muse of deceptive representations, and altered in the new portrayals, and yet there were elusive traces of blue ravens, conspicuous soldiers, and warrior names, tricksters, and many other figurative scenes.

The hues of blue created a sense of natural motion and figural impermanence. The
gueules cassées
, or soldiers with broken faces, and stacked limbs, blue bones afloat, contorted wings, slanted beaks, models of congruity breached, creased, and the common cast of art perspectives were distorted, otherwise the cues of cubism and the avant-garde were always present in native scenes of the blue ravens, but not the obvious painterly geometry.

Aloysius had painted mostly on half sheets of rough wove finish paper,
about two feet wide, but he painted four weighty scenes on full sheets of watercolor paper for the
mutilés de guerre
series and exhibition at the Galerie Crémieux. The paintings, about two feet by three feet framed, were four variations of gruesome abstract scenes of soldiers with broken faces.

In one portrayal,
Blue Ravens and Fractured Peace
, my brother painted four enormous blue ravens, and with huge elaborate beaks, crowded close together in a row across the center of the wide paper, wings askew, and each raven wore a great oval blue peace pendant. The images painted on each pendant were the fractured, broken faces of the
mutilés de guerre
. Crushed cheeks, jaws, bony eye sockets, noses sheared, caved frontal bones, cracked smiles, huge circular scars, nasal cavities covered with thick globs of grafted flesh, and grotesque angles of teeth, lips, and tongues. The peace medals or pendant scenes were painted for the exhibition on a full sheet of wove finish watercolor paper.

Medals of Honor
, the second portrayal of the
mutilés de guerre
and hideous wounds, was a blotchy blue wash with awry traces of connected scars, wounds, cavities, and distorted faces afloat, sealed with oval, twisted images of military decorations, Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Victory Medal, and the Army Wound Chevron. Ignatius Vizenor, the name, was painted in faint rouge over the elongated eagle on the medal of the Distinguished Service Cross.

Aloysius used only natural blue pigments, and wild honey as a binder to paint the waves in two river scenes. He painted enormous river waves in the
ukiyo-e
woodblock print style of
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
by Katsushika Hokusai. The waves reached across the wide sheets of watercolor paper.

The Great Wave on the River Seine
pictured the blue bones of soldiers on the crests of the waves. The blue hands, femurs, thighs, skulls, collarbones, and shards of facial bones protruded and tumbled with the waves. Each bone was touched with a trace of rouge. Two blue ravens were portrayed on the wing in the trough of the waves, and with bones in their claws.

The primary feathers of the blue ravens were painted in the same contours as the crest of the waves. The vane of the feathers flowed into the waves, and the natural blue wash merged feathers with the heavier blue pigment that outlined the mighty waves. The bones were numbered in the hundred thousands, and the numbers were blurred in rouge on the waves.
More than four million soldiers died in the war, and millions more dead civilians.

Alfred Dreyfus, that name of honor in
Dreyfus in Natural Motion
, was printed in distinct outline rouge and the letters were curved in the shape of a fish with dorsal and caudal fins. Dreyfus was in motion upstream with other names submerged in the River Seine. The entire large sheet of watercolor paper was a blue wash with streams of delicate blue hues of underwater currents, and slight beams of rouge sunlight reached through the shadows of the Pont Neuf. The surface of the river was a narrow blue ripple at the very top of the scene, on the deckled edge of the paper.

Alfred Dreyfus, Émile Zola, Georges Picquart, Anatole France, Henri Poincaré, Georges Clemenceau, Basile Hudon Beaulieu, John Clement Beaulieu, Paul Hudon Beaulieu, Lawrence Vizenor, Ignatius Vizenor, Ellanora Beaulieu, Pierre Chaisson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Nathan Crémieux, and many other citizens and soldiers were distinct names painted in the shape of common fish in the current of the River Seine.

Aloysius included his own name in the shape of a sunfish in the shadow stream of the Pont Neuf, and the name of our favorite uncle, Augustus Hudon Beaulieu, who told us about the venal prosecution and scandal of the military court, and he railed against the priestly bigotry and unjust conviction for treason of the loyal artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus.

Augustus had reminded us several times, and especially after he had been drinking with the priest, that we were born in the same year that Alfred Dreyfus was demeaned in a public courtyard at the
École Militaire
.

Dreyfus served almost five years in isolation at a prison in French Guiana. He was exonerated eleven years later, and we were eleven years old, and promoted to major in the
Armée de Terre
, or French Army. The stubby noses of the names of soldiers in the river stream were touched with rouge.

Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy and other names were painted in faint and indistinct blackish letters in the ghastly shape of dead fish and other dreary creatures in the current of the river. Esterhazy and the names of other dishonorable military creatures were gasping for air at the surface of the River Seine. I could imagine the deadly hiss and wheeze of the creatures painted streaky blue with the huge wide mouths of bloated carp.

Major Esterhazy deserved to wheeze to death forever in an abstract portrayal
painted by my brother. The major betrayed his country and then by deceit allowed the conviction and degradation of an honorable military officer only to conceal his own debauchery and treachery. A French military court ruled that Esterhazy was not guilty of espionage for the German Empire.

Édouard Drumont, the publisher of
La Libre Parole
, a socialist and antisemitic newspaper at the time of the betrayal of Dreyfus, was painted by name in the shape of a transparent scaly snake. The snake was shriveled in a simulated gasp at the very top of the underwater scene in the portrayal. Dumont published
La France Juive
, a nasty jingoistic tirade against modern art and the exclusion of Jews from France.