Stealing Picasso (4 page)

Later that night, when the noises of carousing have died down, he tells his posse the coast is clear, unlocks the door and beckons them to come. They climb a dark flight of stairs and,
holding hands, weave along a thin path through a storeroom, pushing through thickets of archived art, before emerging into a dark gallery. Turton whispers, ‘Tread carefully, fuckers, you're in a minefield of masters.'

They follow him slowly, groping their way through one gallery, then another, until they arrive in the hall of the Great Europeans. He sits the posse on the bench seat before the
Weeping Woman
and goes for the light. The switch makes a brassy twang and as she is illuminated, wailing silently, Turton feels a rush of pride as though he himself painted her, brought her misery into being with this new light.

‘There – look,' his voice is low with miracle. ‘She's a whole new nerve. A new way of feeling pain.'

They sit at her feet and get stoned enough that her outlandish face becomes reasonable and motherly, someone they can talk to, confide in. They boast to her of the art they will make themselves. They will make sisters for her. They will make peers. They raise their wine bottles to her. We are going to hang alongside you. Our works.

At dawn, after Turton's art posse have staggered out, leaving minor masters askew in their wake, cleaners in grey overalls tack their way across the wooden floor through the ash and wine-spill, dragging orbital floor-waxers to erase the detritus of Turton's pilgrimage. They straighten the paintings, sneering at them, sneering at her, most of all, and swearing at her quietly in European languages.

It becomes a weekly pilgrimage. Every afternoon at 4.30 pm the National Gallery of Victoria is locked inside its moat and guards patrol its perimeter. Within is a black catacomb of haughty
Vermeers, Breughels giggling piggily and Warhols camply leaning, a bronze lion roaring unto doomsday at oblivious wise men stooping in adoration before a score of wildly different Christs lying in straw alongside appreciative ruminants. All these great works unborn with darkness will be reborn again tomorrow with another dawn.

On Thursdays, after their Limits of Structure class, the art posse stay back in Turton's studio beneath the gallery. They drink wine and smoke dope until the small hours, when they enter the gallery through Turton's private, forgotten door and rise into its belly, where the Great Europeans dwell: the Rembrandt stares pitilessly at the Gauguin nervously shuffling its bare feet, Rodin's lion bares its fangs at the Lamb of God.

Always it is Turton who goes to the light switch and invents her agony with a flash flood of illumination. She cost near two million dollars, the equivalent of a bridge, a road and a school. To these young men this is the one place in the state where the heart has triumphed over the head. Here Art has kicked the concrete arse of superstructure. Here men traded a school for a painting. Here life makes sense.

The
Weeping Woman
is proof that unshaven rakes with hearts of gold can triumph over sensible men in grey suits. The students sit before her pained green face like pilgrims and smell the world of Picasso and tell the
Weeping Woman
of the art they themselves are going to create. Stoned, they sit and drink with a woman who was once Dora Maar.

Harry and his friends imagine a future in which their paintings speak to their countrymen as loud as a game of football. They see a time when people will cast aside their daily struggle to hustle along to a gallery and taste triumph and defeat in dramas laid out on canvas. They see these powerful canvases sold for fabulous sums. This quixotic twaddle sustains them through their days reeking of turpentine and paint. Painting matters, they assure each other. The coming art will be powerful enough to please and enlighten great hordes of Australians. They need to believe this, or why become artists?

And sitting in the National Gallery of Victoria before the
Weeping Woman
, Harry finds it easy to believe. Looking at the richness of her pain, and knowing the enormous sum the Victorian government has paid for her, the importance of art is
evident. He sits there smiling at her, infected with puppy love for this older woman.

He is still smiling dopily when a bus-load of pear-shaped old people smelling of camphor and wearing hand-knitted cardigans shuffles in front of him and scrums down before her to hoot disapproval, all trying to outdo each other in their contempt.

‘Oh, a shameful waste of public money.'

‘I got grandkids knockin' these out.'

‘I got a Labrador paints in this oeuvre – with his tail.'

‘Looks like a painting of a woman who worked all day so she could give half her pay to the taxman so he could spend it on a painting of a woman who worked all day so she could give half her pay to the taxman.'

‘Cheesed off.'

‘Miserable.'

‘Both eyes on one side of her nose.'

‘Elementary mistake.'

‘And both eyes different. I can't stand an artist who can't paint two same things the same. I say go back and have art lessons.'

The
Weeping Woman
is the most expensive painting ever purchased by the state of Victoria and there is great public debate about the money spent on her. If you are on art's side, you are her champion. If you despise art and lament the taxpayer's burden, she is Medusa. A gallery guard sits close by to protect her from those who would strike her down as a false prophet.

These old people have endured a three-hour bus trip to deride her openly. It has become a modern trek. War veterans and widows in middle Victoria can take a bus north to New South Wales to play the poker machines for the weekend, or
south to insult the
Weeping Woman
. Either is a good, fun option. Those that travel south surround her and talk up Turner and the Reformation and Rembrandt, and say the pain evident on her face looks vaguely haemorrhoidal and is not to be compared with the suffering of the poor taxpayer struggling to make ends meet. She possibly brings her detractors more pleasure than she brings her worshippers, as is modern art's fate.

Harry is sitting on the bench despising the ruck of unbelievers that stand between him and the painting when a woman wearing a green suede coat sits down next to him. She has vivid silver streaks in her hair and is beautiful. Eyes so bright as to be almost hostile. He begins to watch her out of the corner of his eye. The contempt grows on her face as she listens to the crowd attacking the
Weeping Woman
. Only a woman confident in her beauty, in her ability to defy age, would let her hair remain so flamboyantly striped with silver. A satchel of henna would annihilate those stripes. But they work to her favour, contrasting with her bright eyes and smooth skin, accentuating her loveliness. The creature of myth, Harry thinks, the woman whose beauty heightens with the years. Catherine Deneuve, Lauren Bacall.

She scowls at the unbelievers, and Harry is so pleased to have found someone else who clearly despises these old farts that he leans towards her and whispers, ‘Arseholes.'

‘Yes,' she agrees in a vaguely European accent. ‘I like to smack their heads.'

‘Me too.' Harry says.

‘I feel sorry for her.'

Harry inclines his head. ‘You come here a lot?'

‘Galleries and paintings …' She looks around, smiling, letting Harry know her love of galleries and paintings. ‘You paint?' she asks.

He feels a rush of pride, as he always does when someone accepts him as an artist. Holding up his hands, spattered with dried paint, he rotates them. ‘I should wash better.'

‘Hands and boots. Always with artists,' she says. His Blundstones have paint drippings across them. To her it looks more like ostentation than neglect: the kid has marked himself as an artist.

‘I'm here at the gallery. At the School of Art downstairs.'

‘You study here in this gallery?' She turns to face him, look at him. ‘You must be very good, I think.'

‘Oh, you know. No. I mean … I don't know. I got in here.'

‘And everyone wants to get in here. So. You are that good, at least. Even if you are no better.' She smiles. ‘You admit to being that good?'

‘Yeah, okay,' he nods. ‘You know a lot of artists?' he asks. ‘You said artists always had paint on their hands and boots.'

‘I have. I am a consultant. I buy art for people.'

Harry feels a vast inner disturbance. ‘You do? But, like, just famous artists, I suppose? Investments.'

‘Mostly well known. But sometimes not. Best of all is to buy the work of an anonymous artist and sell it five years later when he is a freshly dead superstar.'

In his stomach Harry feels a rush of excitement. He turns to face her, straddling the bench seat as he does, leaning forwards. ‘You won't believe this. This is either fate or something else. I'm having my first exhibition this Friday. At the Colditz Gallery in the city.' He waits for her to show surprise at her good luck, for her eyes to widen, her mouth to gape. But she merely smiles politely.

‘Why don't you come? I'm inviting you. Please.'

‘Can you guarantee to be a dead superstar in five years?'

Harry holds up his open hand, showing his palm, taking an oath. ‘I'll cut it down to two and a half.' He puts his hands together before him to beg. She laughs silently at his supplication. ‘Kid …'

He watches the woman hungrily, waiting to see what she will say.

She pouts sceptically. He thinks how a woman's pout is as attractive as her smile. She has the best eyes he's ever seen on anyone.

‘I am not often buying at first exhibitions.'

‘Just come along. Jesus. I am an anonymous guy. I got that part covered.'

‘Many have that part covered.'

‘Tell you what, here's a deal: if you come to my exhibition I'll escort you in here on a midnight tour. Just us. None of these dumb arseholes polluting the vibe.' He sweeps a hand at the old people.

‘You can?' She looks around doubtfully.

‘Yeah, I can. It's beautiful in here at night, without the dirt-bags. Like being a president or a royal. You know they opened up the Louvre at night once for Charles and Di? Only them in the whole damn wonderland.'

Harry wanted to stun them with
Big Red Bite
– a two-metre square canvas of a goliath businessman with screaming Africans stuck between his teeth as he takes a bite from a bleeding world. Put it on the wall right opposite the gallery entrance and make a statement. Let them know he wasn't some shrinking violet of the Shrinking Violet school of art. Here was a painter deep inside the mind of man, gorging the full psychic smorgasbord. But when he suggested
Big Red Bite
should hang in the foyer, Chloe Gwyther, the gallery owner, laid a hand on his buttock and pulled him within whisper, close enough for him to see the whiskers lying prone in the slurry of her foundation. ‘The annex, Harry, the annex. A room it will entirely vanquish,' she assured him.

So
Big Red Bite
is hanging in the annex and in the foyer is a painting of his sister masturbating with a boot. Rendered
impressionistically enough to be only faintly pornographic so no one would be repulsed, and impressionistically enough to be only faintly his sister so she would never know he had spent all those nights in her wardrobe. He hoped it was a strong enough work. First impressions are everything. But at $2000, is it too expensive? Maybe he should have put something cheaper here, something that would sell early and let people know it was all right to buy.

For days he has arranged and rearranged the order in which his works should hang, until this morning Chloe lost patience and snapped at Michael, her assistant, ‘Hang them. Not in any special order – but by five o'clock.' Michael, a failed gay who has retreated into a lofty asexuality, became a blur of hammer, nail, tape measure and spirit level in his Ermenegildo Zegna suit. And now a painting of Harry's sister masturbating with a boot hangs in the foyer. And while her face is partly obscured by her forearm, she is using a distinctive green knee-high boot with a purple heart on its heel. One of a pair his mother long ago donated to the Salvos. Will she recognise these boots? Harry wonders. Will she storm in here and call me a disgusting pig and throw champagne on me in front of everyone? She loves a scene. Not above her to flounce in and steal my thunder just because I've used my own life in my art, and part of my own life was standing in her wardrobe watching her bring herself off with a boot. Maybe she'll throw herself across the painting to screen it from public view, screaming at people to look away. It wouldn't be the first time she's stolen centre stage by screaming about her need for privacy.

These are only a few of the thoughts haunting Harry as the guests begin to arrive into these spaces of blond floorboards strewn with light shards exploding off plastic chandeliers. Suddenly the people in his paintings look ugly to him. They
undergo a horrifying metamorphosis, the sight of which stuns him. When he first stood back to look at them, freshly finished, still wet, in his studio, the Australians he had painted had an inner depth illuminated by the psychiatry of Freud. Here in the Colditz Gallery they look like smirking muggers. Carjackers cashed up from hauling housewives out of Mazdas at traffic lights. Violent and opportunistic people.

I've made a mistake, he tells himself. No one wants to buy these leering muggers, these delirious masturbators. Art is hung in living rooms. And living rooms are refuges designed to exclude muggers and wankers. Living rooms are built to hold armchairs and books and a family and a bottle of wine and a meal and a conversation held around a vase of flowers. I should have painted flowers.

After four champagnes he is strong enough to ask his father what he thinks.

‘Pretty existential, Harry. Pretty existential.' Give me chrysanthemums.

‘They're marvellously … operatic, Harry,' his mother says. I'm for rhododendrons.

Hardly anyone is looking at his paintings, anyway. They're talking and laughing, each immersed in another person. Drinking champagne and waiting their turn to tell their stories and have their jokes laughed at. Their backs to the walls, a crowd facing itself.

Harry begins to feel all these people have been called together to shun his art. Turton Pym, his tutor, furtively circumnavigates the room, talking to no one, his back hunched under the dead weight of all his unbearable anonymity, hands in his trench-coat pockets, silver sideboards glistening with Black Diamond pomade, canting his whole torso twenty degrees to starboard to view the paintings as if they were hung askew.

This is failure. The bell tolling on his career as an artist. Harry can actually hear a bell tolling. And there is the old crone Gwyther herself, the gallery owner, squealing at some woman's anecdote like a mule on fire, then smiling at him over the woman's pale shoulder. Smiling at him in disappointment, because Harry Broome, an up-and-comer she has gambled a glossy catalogue and a Friday night and six-dozen bottles of méthode champenoise on, has let her down. Harry Broome has just burst from the closet and announced himself the town's freshest dud. And she's pointing now. Pointing. To the exit? Get out? You're finished? His eyes follow her rheumatically knobbed forefinger.

Chloe Gwyther is pointing at
Fun with Shoes
. In the lower right-hand corner of its frame is a red spot. It is sold. Surely his mother has done this. Taken his father by a shirt-button and pulled him close. ‘We'll sell the campervan, Lee. We'll buy a painting.' She has seen him dying and reached out to save him. That's what mothers are for.

But even as he watches, Chloe, shorter by a half head than usual because she's stooped in supplication, nods at something the pale-skinned woman is saying, then catches Michael's eye and points a finger at
BeachHead
. He rushes forwards and sticks a red spot to its frame. They wander, Chloe Gwyther and the woman, Harry following at a distance behind. Michael, a scampering monkey now, finds ever more theatrical ways to lay on the red spots.

The woman buying his paintings is the woman who assured him she wouldn't. Bright eyed beneath shoulder-length hair striped with silver. Chloe Gwyther is thought attractive, but she looks like a broiled crawfish standing next to this woman, who nods now at
Big Red Bite
. Chloe semaphores to Michael and he goes to the painting, bends his knees, lowers his head
and lays on the red spot with the solemnity of a general pinning on a medal.

The tolling of the bell has stopped, St Paul's Cathedral having told the town it is 9 pm. In the silence a lie has also stopped. Harry Broome has sold a painting and the lie of art school is behind him. The lie he and his friends have told each other a thousand times: they are artists because they say they are artists and they paint; it has nothing to do with any judgement the world can confer. What the world says doesn't matter because the world is peopled by tiny, retreating souls whose approval is no validation of their art. This is the lie they tell out loud while silently, desperately, wanting the world to buy their paintings.

Every one of them knows it is a lie. Harry often thinks this is what it must have been like to be part of a Communist regime or a Church: all secretly aware of the inherent fallacy of the faith, all secretly aware of the awareness of others of the inherent fallacy of the faith, yet spruiking the faith, morning, noon and night.

Harry has sold a painting. He looks around at his works. They have become strong again, their colours beautiful and their cast profound.

A journalist from
The Age
in an aqua cashmere cardigan takes him into Chloe Gwyther's office and sits cross-legged on Chloe's desk while he struggles to tell her his influences, motivations, aspirations. Where does he get his ideas from? He holds back from telling her Picasso and Freud. It is a secret, and would make him sound derivative and maybe an obvious plagiarist. ‘Who can say where ideas come from?' He stares at her, shaking his head while he lifts his open hands towards the ceiling. ‘I think them up.'

His sister, Amelia, turns up in fancy stitched rodeo boots. She stands in front of
Fun with Shoes
twirling her fingers in her
hair with her eyes squinted. ‘The boots with the purple hearts. Whatever happened to them?'

‘Mum gave them to the Salvos.'

‘The Salvos? What do bag ladies want with four-inch heels?' She makes no mention of what the purple hearts are being used for in the painting. Did she know all along he was in that wardrobe?

A group surrounds him and Chloe Gwyther unrolls a hand towards him and says, ‘This is the young man we're all so excited about.' Three people congratulate him simultaneously, but he only hears the silver-striped woman say, ‘Ah, the anonymous kid. Hello.'

Harry feels wildly beholden to her. She has saved him and he feels a surge of gratitude. To express this gratitude he looks her up and down, slowly, showily, with a lecher's cocked lip, as a compliment to her beauty, her unfaded sexuality. Those brightly sad eyes behind wire-rimmed, square-lensed glasses. She blinks, waiting until he has completed his gaudy perusal, and says, ‘Oh, kid.' A reproach that reddens his face.

‘Harry … Mireille.' Chloe shows each to the other with the flat of her hand as she says their names.

‘I am thinking to do a room of you. At my place,' Mireille says.

‘Yeah?'

‘I wish you could help me to decide where to hang them. Which should be the neighbour of which. I think an artist knows which baby belongs with which baby.' Mireille nods, willing him to agree.

‘I'll give it a go,' Harry shrugs.

‘Between us, then, we might have the decisions.'

‘Well, yeah. We might. Yeah.'