Stealing Picasso (2 page)

As you walk down Southbank Boulevard on the south side of the National Gallery of Victoria, the land drops away and the gallery rises like a mediaeval fortress, complete with moat. Through an unmarked steel door in this fortress wall, down a flight of steps, is a catacomb, where workers beaver away at the many administrative tasks that need doing in order for a gallery of international standing to run efficiently.

In this catacomb is a suite of eight large rooms. Their floors are covered in rumpled, paint-stained drop-sheets on which are strewn sketchpads, easels, palettes, canvases covered in dwarfish nudes, leaden still lifes, unfired pots, clogged brushes, open books; everywhere jars half-filled with brightly coloured waters with brushes standing in them. This is the National Gallery School of Art. Attendance at this school is thought essential, by its students, to a young Australian artist's future.

By day Harry attends, with a handful of other students chosen from the thousands who have applied to be here, and he is taught the Limits of Structure by a stoned ruin called Turton Pym. Somewhere beyond the Limits of Structure is the jumping-off point every artist has to find, Turton Pym tells them. Every artist, like every paratrooper, has to jump. Many times the chute fails to open. Hard fact about art.

Turton Pym wants to make his students into giants and has an inkling he might make a giant of Harry. Turton Pym wants to make giants because in the fifties he hung out with Whiteley and Olsen and was thought the boy most likely. By the mid sixties those two had found fame and Turton was still mentioned alongside them, and it was rumoured he was working on something big. By the mid seventies he spat at his reflection in mirrors and pierced his penis with a silver bolt and grew ridiculous self-mocking sideburns that pouffed out on either side of his face. Because by this time he was the hated nobody who had killed the boy most likely.

Turton was sent mad by the success of his friends. Left behind in anonymity while they gambolled ahead into fame, he felt abandoned by the Fates, who had whispered to him constantly as a boy. He lived for many years in a terrible, sad silence once those Fates were struck mute. Until, in the early eighties, he came up with the idea of ‘giants'. Turton Pym is going to create greater giants than the ones his friends became. His ambition now is to raise an army of towering geniuses who will infinitely diminish and totally obscure Whiteley and Olsen. At which point all three of those lads who set off together in the fifties to be artists will be worth exactly the same … nothing.

In order to do this he clings to the National Gallery like an oyster to a rock, hoping to create artists of gargantuan stature. In this way Turton Pym has regained his inner voices,
and although his sideburns still pouf self-mockingly, and in moments of passion he is known to pull at them, one in each hand, shaking his head between the two, his penis is no longer pierced.

In his private time he earns dope money airbrushing snarling critters and bare-breasted warrior girls onto the fuel tanks of the Harley Davidsons of the Stinking Pariahs. It is piecework, caricature. There is no invention in it. It is the work of an advanced sign-writer, which requires a slavish devotion to the
Airbrush Technique Handbook
. It is not a pastime he wants the art world to know about, because the sad truth about an artist who hires himself out to copy angry carnivores for criminals is that he has given up any attempt to express fine, unsayable things; has given up poetry for whoredom. Turton's guilty secret (so secret he only admits it to himself when he is in his shed with the compressor humming) is that he enjoys airbrushing cartoon animals onto motorbikes.

But tonight that shed and that pastime are far away, part of another world. Tonight, in the National Gallery Art School, he is a teacher, creating giants. He tells his students that painting is an eyeball-to-eyeball slugfest with a champ called Failure – an opponent very few ever beat. Those who do, beat him only one time in ten. That's nine out of ten days of all the days of your life thrown on the dump. And that's for those who are successful, famous.

Standing before an easel in his studio while they sit cross-legged on the floor, he raises his fists. ‘As soon as you shape up to the canvas the fight begins. You either win or Failure wins. There is no honourable draw.'

On a table in the middle of the room Turton has placed a model truck. Before it is a small wooden mannequin, posed with its arms flung high, its back arched beyond vertebral
likelihood, as if spinning into space away from the speeding truck. This elf-sized pedestrian, caught a moment after impact, its wooden head the same shape and wearing the same expression as a hen's egg, is his subject.

Wearing a purple waistcoat Turton dances before the canvas. His eyes darting quickly from it to the unlucky pedestrian, he begins to bring this tiny eggheaded hit-and-run victim to the last moment of its life. Wildly, within a choreography of feint and thrust such as a boxer might use, he works the canvas. He jabs, sidesteps, ducks and slashes at it, while his eyes flit from the wooden mannequin to his painting and back. Slowly a woman appears on his canvas, wearing jodhpurs and a loose cerise blouse. Features form on her face. She is a few years beyond her most beautiful, perhaps on her way to attend a twenty-year school reunion. Her blonde hair whiplashing tautly to the left of the canvas gives her a horrible velocity.

Now Turton slows, becomes tentative, almost furtive, apologetic in his movements. No show of the pugilist any more. Having brought her to life he has to introduce her moment of death to her features. At first he experiments with a small downturn of lip and an angry squint. Tiny dabs of paint. To his students she appears slightly miffed to be killed by this model truck. They frown, each showing their fellows they see her expression as cheap and inappropriate – nowhere near dramatic enough.

Next, Turton tilts her head back (is she beseeching some higher force?), her mouth slightly open (a question? ‘Why, Lord?'), her eyes sorrowful, a hint of tears.

‘I don't know, Turton,' Sedify Bent says. ‘She looks like the post has arrived and her mail-order vibrator hasn't been delivered again. You know … let down, rather than killed.'

The students laugh and offer more dissent. ‘And, like,
Turton, a truck-smash kills you pretty bloody quick. You don't have time to cry about it.'

‘I think she's mistaken death for a small tragedy. Like, so far she only knows her Ray-Bans are smashed.'

‘No, I'm with the vibrator thing. It's a pissed-off, what-the-hell-kind-of-service-are-Australia-Post-running? kind of look.'

Harry is confident enough to hold his advice until his fellow students have spent their ideas. When they are done he offers: ‘Why not have her look happy? We all know she's dead, but she doesn't know it herself yet. In the millisecond since her spine's been shattered no thought has had a chance to bloom. She's totally unaware her happy day is over. Dramatic irony.'

It's a good idea and Turton feels a flash of anger at Harry for having it. And for having it publicly while he is struggling to bring real, lasting pain to this woman's face. Through gritted teeth he answers, ‘Let's say she heard the truck and realised her mistake. I want her to know: “Here is life's end. Never more shall I see … the kiddies, whatever.”' He turns to face the canvas, trying not to hyperventilate at his inability to compose this expression on the woman's face.

They watch him silently for an hour as he sweats in his paralysis; the ideas won't come. They come, but are wrong. What did this women's life mean? How much did she know of her own untimely death? What did she feel about it? Can you make peace with your god in the nanosecond available, and, if so, would you look serene? Every now and then Turton dabs or strokes the canvas, hopeful it will enliven her tragedy. But eventually his ideas peter out and he becomes stone. Defeated. Wet with sweat. Labouring for breath.

He begins swearing at the woman on his canvas, making low threats. ‘I fathered you and I'll kill you … big trumpets
blaring. Harps, harps playing fucking angel music. You bitch. A heavenly host will sing you to your rest.' But he paints no more. Leaning drunkenly against his easel he lays his brushes down and takes a grey sideburn in each hand. Brandishing his own head like a trophy, he turns it back to look at the painting. She is smirking at her own death by now. Turton admits, ‘I lost … again … clearly. Sometimes the thing you want can't be coaxed from the canvas. But did you watch my eyes, my feet, my hips? How I sweated and struggled?' He lights a joint and tears come to his eyes as he scowls at his students. ‘You think art is easy? It's war.' He takes the canvas off the easel and sets it aside. ‘I'll finish this later.'

It's a lie. Turton has reached a stage where he can't finish a painting, because an unfinished painting is full of the rich pageant of possibility; of wisdom, triumph, light, beauty. But in a finished painting one only ever captures the finite, the known, and the canvas is thus estranged from the masterpiece it was going to be. Here in his studio at the NGV hundreds of half-finished works lean against one another, in each a flicker of possibility burning like a pilot light.

‘My mistake? What was my mistake?' He points at various students for answers, but none want to give a name to his failure. ‘I painted this dying woman from scratch. I invented her. I shouldn't have. It's almost impossible to kill someone well if you don't love them. When painting death, your best chance of making it real is to use the face of someone you love. Kill your mother, your brother, your family, your friends. Butcher them like lambs; they are your only real chance at truth. Picasso used his wife to show the pain of war.' He says it softly, having noticed over the years his students listen best when he talks lowest, either detecting gravity in his hushed tone or excited that he might be divulging a secret.

Turton Pym is thought a masterful art teacher because he speaks with the authority of failure. Some students are scared by the pain in his eyes and drop out of the course. But some are beguiled by it, as one might be by tragedy. Pain is a reflection of loss, and if the pain is great then the thing lost must be great. They are drawn to Turton Pym to discover what he has lost. To know of Art. None of them know his ulterior motive for being a good teacher. None of them know he wants to make artists famous enough to obliterate Whiteley and Olsen.

Tonight, as the students begin to leave, Turton, his purple waistcoat still damp from his exertions before the canvas, produces a bottle of red wine and winks at the few students he has chosen to become giants. After the others have left, Harry and Pasquale Knapp and Roland Loader and Tim Lechich and Sedify Bent lie around in Turton's studio. Though these students are dressed as vagabonds in faded jeans and paint-stained shirts, each wears an item of gentility. Harry has a sports coat on, Roland Loader wears a fedora, Sedify Bent a pair of brogues. Just a hint of style peeping from under the bohemian blanket.

Turton locks the door to the street and opens the bottle and lights a joint and begins to talk of old days in Australian art. ‘When Boyd was young he lacked all confidence in painting people. If he was painting a banker he would always write beneath it, “A banker”, so no one would think it was a farmer. One time he painted a cow and I snuck into his studio and wrote beneath it, “A cow”. He was livid. Next month, when he painted my portrait he wrote beneath it, “Unknown”.' Turton looks ruefully at his hands, front and back. ‘Which, you'd have to say, was cruel.'

He tells his students of nights spent with Streeton and Nolan, double-jointed debaucheries had with Hester, Tucker's thoughts on order and culture and his curious odour, Pugh's hidden family. Through clenched teeth he rattles off the ideas Olsen stole from him, then, with drooping lips, describes the despair he felt as a competitor when he first saw Whiteley's work on the English murderer John Christie.

‘Of course, I painted many of Whiteley's early works myself. Just for smack. It was hard to get, back then. He had a name and we both had habits. So we'd stand side by side churning out Whiteleys to pay for it. He'd lean over every now and then, give me a few instructions: “Pym, you hardhearted bastard … everything's stone and steel with you. Add a dog, add a fish. People love fish.” Then, with fish fresh in his mind, he'd add a fish to the Whiteley he was doing. We'd be side by side painting completely different Whiteley fish. Couple of months later the critics would see the unrelated fish and say Brett had a “multi-lensed eye”. They were in a mood to believe, back then.'

With this excited and largely invented gossip Turton Pym leads his chosen posse of baby giants through old times and high moments of bohemian Australia. He tours them through the feuds and affairs, the successes and tragedies, forgeries and flops of the great names of Australian art, while they toke on the weed he paid for by airbrushing mongoose
v
. cobra stoushes onto the Harley Davidsons of the Stinking Pariahs.