Seek My Face (5 page)

“Yes, the profile. Those gleaming metallic bangs. The muscles in my throat, I suppose. But it seemed to Ruk, his facility, too much of a trick; he sneered at his own work and admired the rough brutes—Soutine, Kokoschka, Picasso when he wasn’t neoclassical, the late half-blind Monet. He thought Dubuffet, who was getting some notice in America, was on to something. He told me to loosen up.”

Hope senses that Kathryn is dissatisfied. She wants her to do more, somehow, with poor dear aimless Ruk. Does she want her to tell her how it was to fuck him? That was not what Ruk was about—his lovemaking was good, when he was halfway sober, but had less heart in it than his dancing; he had to be on show, that was his weakness, and even though he was Hope’s first lover she soon felt herself bringing the greater conviction to their bed, the greater willingness to risk embarrassment for the sake of sensations that couldn’t be sprayed with fixative and put on display, that were beautiful but not lasting. She says, “He was beautiful,” which was what he would have wanted her to say. “He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Six foot four at least, high white forehead, these almond-shaped Russian eyes, pale blue like those of a husky dog, frosty around the pupil. The hair on his head was as lank and pampered as a woman’s, and he loved his own legs, they were so long, the ankles so skinny. He was always taking off his pants at parties, not to be sexy but the way a male ballet dancer shows his legs. He said he was White Russian, but, then, that means so little to an American, all the Russians one met back then were White, as opposed to Red. The Red ones were in Russia, slugging it out with the Germans. Does that do him for you?”

Kathryn lifts her luminous matte face and bats her lubricated eyelids one beat, to register Hope’s hostility and to
show that she can take it. “Not entirely,” she admits. “Did you love him?”

“Oh, of course, I’m sure. Isn’t that what one does, a young woman, early twenties, romantic about art and artists? I will say this for Ruk—he showed me things. He showed me New York. He had a yellow Lincoln, God knows how he got gas for it. He drove me up and down the avenues, all the way up to the spots in Harlem, the cafés, the parties. He would dress me. I absolutely submitted—he knew what he was doing. One costume party, he had me go as a nun, an outfit he had made or stolen. Maybe he stole it from a real nun—he told me his sisters were Russian Orthodox and very fanatic, like the Empress Alexandra. He liked me in black dresses, with bright stockings to show off my legs. Legs—though I wasn’t tall I had a tall woman’s legs, he said. He would paint stripes of color on my face, and put a few feathers in my hair; he called me his Quaker Pocahontas. He made me a
presence
, in our little set at Cooper Union. He took me to openings, and told me what was good, what was not so good: Picasso not so good, he could do too much, too easily. Matisse was good because everything was at the outer limit, attained with effort, by a simple bourgeois man. Picasso was a gypsy, a bandit, a Bolshevik.” She can begin to hear Ruk’s voice, his skimming voice with its deep tonic, a Russian choir voice, vibrant through his screen of sophistries. “He said the Surrealists were right in that the subconscious must do the moving, the talking, but wrong in that they were all literary, and wanted just to play word games and politics. At the same time, he was turning out these society portraits of pampered women and their pretty children and even their pretty dogs. Ruk was at his best with dogs, certain breeds. But he drank. I had never seen a man drink like this, my grandfather didn’t
drink at all and my father just wine at the occasional special meal; the fathers of my friends maybe had a whiskey in their hands when I’d peek into the library, but I thought it was just a prop, I didn’t know it could be a religion, drinking. I drank, too, as I said. But if it isn’t a religion to you you aren’t a real drinker. At any rate, Ruk—I was too young to see that he was going to seed, getting puffy, his hands shaky, yellow from nicotine, despairing that he wasn’t a rough genius, one of the great brutes. Also, any man of that time who wasn’t in the armed forces, it made you a subspecies. Men felt it, even if they laughed at feeling it. Ruk had a rheumatic heart, I guess. Rheumatic as well as romantic. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, or made up lies about.”

“I have read,” Kathryn interposes with a considerate smile, adjusting by an inch the Sony’s position on the varnished yellow sea-chest, “that he bragged of sleeping with the society women he painted.”

“He did sleep with some of them. I knew it, though I didn’t want him to describe it to me. He wanted to. That was his thing, showing off. But it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, I had flings too, those two years we were together. Maybe I was trying to make him jealous. Or just doing it for its own sake. I had come late to sex, and it was like a glorious toy. It was power and submission and danger, it was a way of getting to know somebody and having them know you. It was a way of weaving a kind of costume of secrets. Isn’t that how it still is?”

Did Kathryn blush? Certainly she moves her head a bit away, adjusting its angle as she had that of the tape recorder. “Yes, perhaps,” she says, “I suppose. But we have AIDS now, and there’s very little of the glorious-toy feeling left. The idea of its being part of some revolution is quite gone. The quality-porno-film idea. Sex as a cause.”

Hope says, feeling rebuked and taking a brisk chastising tone in self-defense, “Well, my dear, we didn’t have AIDS, but we had pregnancy. And the clap, they called it. There wasn’t all that talk of crabs, as there was in the ’sixties. And syphilis if you were ever so unlucky. I was always lucky, I figured because my heart was pure. And I didn’t sleep with just anybody, as some of the girls and models did, I had to respect the man. I had to think he was serious, at least about painting. Anyway: Ruk, whom you seem to care about a great deal. He was kind to me, as kind as a self-infatuated alcoholic can be. He broadened me, he showed me around. God knows what he saw in me.”

“If he was sinking, as you say,” Kathryn supplies, “you were a straw he was grasping. You were Hope.” Another joke; her eyes, heavy and opaque like plums, widen and glisten, watching the older woman’s response. Kathryn’s jokes are spoiled for Hope by the suspicion that they are maneuvers and not the spontaneous, selfless embrace of absurdity that humor should be. Ruk and she, on a night of champagne and vodka, would laugh and laugh; everybody looked ridiculous and pathetic, his rumbling choir voice with its slurred consonants slipping one caricature after another into her ears. “His portrait of you shows what he saw. You look extremely vital and confident.”

The closeness of this approach—the fact of another person in the room breathing, like a humidifier softly hissing—makes Hope uncomfortable. She is used to the dry quiet of solitude, of parched pure winter days. She says, to restore a distance, “It was through Ruk that I first met Korgi, and Onno de Genoog.”

“And what were they like?”

These vanished dead men, why does Kathryn’s voice grow warmer, evasively slack, as if contemplating stealing
them for herself? “Alike, really. They were both immigrants, and had that Continental élan; they assumed the world was made for human pleasure, a very snobbish and barbaric view, of course, but it made them attractive; it gave them swagger and freed them up to paint in those lovely light colors they used. They were the same age, oddly, though you think of Korgi as a generation older. He got there first. I mean, there had been Kandinsky and Malevich and Mondrian, of course, doing abstraction, but they were like flares at sea, lonely signals, religious in a crazy way no one could be seriously expected to imitate—I mean,
think
of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, what we are being asked to swallow! It all goes back to Kandinsky—his essays, and Der Blaue Reiter, spiritualism rescuing us from materialism and the dreadful perspective-mad Renaissance and so on, as I’m sure you know better than I, since you’ve just been studying everything. But all it brought Kandinsky to was a lot of ugly, jumpy geometry, whereas the place that Korgi got to turned out to be an island, a large island full of these fantasic, edible flowers. I mean, everybody could eat them, and grow and grow. After Korgi committed suicide—when was that? ’48, just when his influence was triumphing, really—Onno would talk about the first time he visited Korgi’s studio, in Union Square, sometime in the ’thirties. He said the atmosphere was so saturated with beauty it made him dizzy. ‘Dissy,’ he pronounced it. It was a revelation he never got over. You can see it in the colors both men used—those coral pinks, those baby blues, the darting strokes between oval forms like amoebas or lily pads, floating across the canvas like, what?, those things in the vision when you look at a blank wall, in the vitreous humor—though in Korgi of course it all becomes transparent, whereas Onno tried to thicken everything, a ferocious
thicket of strokes, but the colors are still playful, childlike even. Korgi, like Ruk, was strikingly tall, almost freakish, and his English could be witty. He called the Regionalist School ‘poor painting for poor people.’ ”

Hope laughs, remembering the velvety accent, the cape and broad-brimmed hat, the haughty indignation, the searching light in the Armenian’s mournful long-lashed eyes as he respectfully searched Hope’s face for his opportunities there. He was, through maintaining a parasitic connection with the Art Students League, a considerable harvester in the ripe fields of the art-struck. He would say to a girl, “Come to my studio, be my
vooman
.” But Hope would laugh. She was never tempted. He was simply Ruk again, though with a naïve, unnegotiable genius that Ruk lacked, and she sensed in him reserves of nihilism that Ruk’s butterfly nature did not threaten her with. She was too young, she thought, to take on a troubled man, though in a few years she would take on Zack.

“And it was Ruk,” she informs Kathryn, “who put me on to Hermann Hochmann and his little school, where the real action was. I don’t think we said ‘where the action was’ then. Or ‘cutting edge.’ What did we say? ‘Most advanced,’ maybe. There was this military notion of advance. Hochmann had set up shop in a single big third-story room on West Ninth Street. The day I walked in, the whole school, about twenty at their easels, was gathered around this most odd still life—some broken pottery, a crumpled Kleenex, a playing card, and a ball of string from the hardware store, with the paper band still on it, and the whole thing backed by cellophane raked by a side light so that it all was fragmented reflections and shadows. It was almost impossible to look at, let alone paint. Yet, everybody was painting away, and after a year of drawing plaster casts at Cooper,
the smell of real paint was heavenly. Like wind on your face when you ice-skate.”

“What was Hochmann like?”

“Oh, Kathryn, you’ll think I’m so silly to keep saying this, but he was handsome. Every man I ran up against in those days seemed to me handsome. Even though Hochmann was over sixty by then, he was tall and broad, with hair left long like a musician’s and tremendous big features—a wonderfully sensual, imperious mouth—and still very Germanic, very solemn, very hard to understand. Both his English, and what he was saying with it. He hadn’t come here until he was fifty, and then to the West Coast. He was a missionary, bringing the gospel of modernism to an art scene that, of course, was very much American Wave—Benton’s farmhands in the style of El Greco, Grant Wood and Rockwell Kent and that mock-epic stylization. Mural style for the Common Man. Hooray for democracy. Some of it, John Steuart Curry, the Soyer brothers, doesn’t look so terrible now, it’s become art history, but at the time we
despised
it. The thing about Hochmann was, a lot of people were vaguely talking about abstraction as the only ethical way to paint, but he offered a concrete prescription. He said astonishing things—astonishing to me, at least. He said when you put a single line on a piece of paper there is no telling what its direction is. But if you put a shorter line under it, the longer line
moves
, and the shorter one goes in the opposite direction. He said the piece of paper had now become a universe, in motion. He said the edges of paper became lines, too. And—this must have been Hegel, or Kant, thesis and antithesis and whatever—that when there was a third thing, as in music when two notes combine to make a third sound, this third thing was spiritual, non-physical, surreal. This was magic, he felt. The two lines
moving in different directions had tension between them, and that made them a living thing, what he called ‘a living unit.’ With color it got more complicated. Color, he said, made us feel certain ways—buoyant, depressed. Some colors receded, others came forward. He kept talking about ‘push and pull.’
Poo-oosh und pool
.”

Hochmann’s ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer, the handsome big face vulnerably lit by his daily hope of communicating to the students the spiritual depth of paint, the students in their dirty smocks, salmon or oatmeal in color, white socks and penny loafers and saddle shoes peeking out below, the boys leaning against the smirched hallway walls smoking, the girls in stiff ’forties imitations of Hollywood hair as it was then, pageboys, bangs, stiff waves done with those long-nosed curling irons, you plugged them in and they opened like birds’ beaks, all those listening young heads buzzing with hopes, with frayed connections to the past and future, the streets outside brown and gray and jostling in her mind’s eye like village rows in a Chagall or a Kirchner, even the spires in distant midtown—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State—caught up in the soot, the toxic war clouds, while Hochmann strove to impart his saving message: “
Begrenzung
. What do you say in English? Limitation. The canvas is a limitation. Without consciousness of limitation there can be no expression of the Infinite.
Unendlichkeit. Ewigkeit
. Beethoven creates Eternity in the physical limitation of the symphony. Any limitation can be subdivided infinitely. This involves the problem of time and relativity. A single star seen alone in space tells us nothing about space. Space must be vital and active. The space on the canvas must have a life of the spirit, the life of a creative mind. Pictorial space exists two-dimensionally,
only. When the two-dimensionality of a picture is violated, it falls, how do you say, into parts—it creates an effect of naturalistic space, a special case, a portion of three-dimensionality, and this is an incomplete expression of the artist’s experience. Thus it is inadequate. The layman has difficulty in comprehending that plastic creation on a flat surface must not destroy this flat surface. Depth is created by a recession of apparent objects toward a vanishing point, as in Renaissance perspective, but in absolute denial of this doctrine by the creation of surface forces in the sense of
push and pull
. Nor should one try to create depth by the use of tonal gradation, any more than one should create depth by carving a hole in the picture. To create the phenomenon of
push and pull
on a flat surface, one has to understand that by nature the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received, as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. The function of
push and pull
in respect to form contains the secret of Michelangelo’s monumentality. Cézanne understood color as a force of
push and pull
, and in his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of color. Color is a plastic means of creating, ah,
Abstände
. Intervals. Intervals are color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. The whole world comes to us, as we experience it, through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. The mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art. The life-giving zeal in a work of art is deeply embedded in its qualitative substance. The
Geist
, the spirit, in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly
geistig
, spiritual.” On and on he would preach, pausing where a German word, a
Kantian concept, occurred to him first and had to be painfully, inaccurately translated.