The Prize (3 page)

Julia Rosenthal lifted her head away from Charlotte and they exchanged a quick glance. He studied her face. She wore large black-framed professor glasses that overtook her small features. From a distance she looked studious and prim but up close the look was softer. Tiny worry lines fanned from the outskirts of her eyes. She gestured with her hands as she spoke, glancing up at him with brightness in her face. He remembered meeting her twenty years ago at a reception after she won the Rome Prize, and being drawn to her then, too. Funny how one person could strike you as someone you'd like to know, and years later you felt the same tug. He watched as she tucked herself into a cab with Charlotte. So much had happened since then. For a second he thought about scooting into the seat next to her but waited for another cab with the others. Once he'd checked into his hotel and called home, the anxiety of separating from his family dissipated. In the cab, the warm breeze against his face, anticipating the morning ahead, he felt as if he'd suddenly come alive.

He entered the gallery space and found an aisle seat in one of the uncomfortable folding chairs arranged in rows. In New York
there were contracts to review and budgets to approve and clients to keep in touch with. He loved what he did but as of late it was beginning to feel stale. He wanted to discover someone new whose work would excite him again and make an indelible mark. More of his work was about profits and making margins and less about the inventiveness of art and putting his stamp on it, but here he was, far away from all that.

He'd been chosen to speak in Berlin at one of the fair's select events based on the gallery's recent flurry of successful shows, including Agnes Murray's, but he wasn't sure he should have accepted the invitation. He looked down at the schedule in his lap. The seven days ahead were filled with trips to prominent museums and galleries, lectures, luncheons, and dinners. Thinking about it was exhausting.

He watched as Julia wandered in, wearing a cranberry dress and a silk scarf with a Matisse-like pattern draped around her neck. It occurred to him, watching her, that another man might find her to be ordinary, but there was something about the way she held herself that to him was sexy. She looked for an empty seat and found one in his row. Her hips brushed against him when he stood to let her scoot past. She wasn't exactly beautiful—you had to feel it to be beautiful—but there was a freshness to her look that he found compelling.

Gerhardt Strauss of Strauss and Keipen stood before the podium and everyone quieted. Thinking of his own presentation later in the week, he wondered how Strauss would command an audience.

Tall, with a crop of spiky white hair, Strauss began an informal overview of contemporary German art in the overheated gallery space. Edward's BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket; he missed
another call from Holly. When their daughter was little, Holly packed her days while Annabel was at preschool with her volunteer work at the animal refuge and weekends riding at the barn. She was involved in numerous committees for animal rights. She hadn't minded his traveling. Or maybe it was that he hadn't traveled quite so much then.

His BlackBerry buzzed again. It was Georgia, his assistant at the gallery. He turned it off. Lately, when he woke in the middle of the night, his hand went for his BlackBerry. He told himself to enjoy Berlin, to take in the art and the city, to try to relax. Holly and Annabel were fine.

When he came out of his thoughts, he'd lost the flow of the lecture. “Exactly a century after the first stirrings of German Expressionism, Germany's young artists are gaining traction and creating some of the most assured art to be found anywhere. Outstanding artists abound in all areas, but it is the boldness of current German painting that is generating waves of excitement in the art world.” Strauss mentioned the American painter Nate Fisher, by way of comparing his work with that of Strauss and Keipen's renowned artist Edgar Schlinder.

Alex Savan interrupted to ask a question. “Is Schlinder as popular as Nate Fisher? In America Fisher revitalized the art world after 9/11. He's become a trailblazer for other artists.”

In New York, Savan was at every significant function and opening. He wore slick loafers with silly tassels without socks, pink shirts and gold cufflinks, and walked briskly into a room, gravitating to the power circle, with an air of self-importance. His wavy blond hair—a color so unnaturally yellow and shiny it looked dyed—was pushed back from his large forehead. With a dimpled, thick chin
and sallow eyes, he was unpleasant to look at. Edward shook his head and sighed. Poor Savan. After he'd come to know him, he learned that Savan's parents were from a small, impoverished town in West Virginia. He'd gotten a scholarship at Princeton—he never let you forget it—and was an art handler at Christie's before he landed his entry-level position at Reinstein and climbed through the ranks. All his grandiosity was a cover. It made Edward have a soft spot for him, but he feared that Savan's compulsive need to make himself known was going to ruin Berlin. He gazed at Julia, totally engaged by Strauss's lecture, occasionally making a note in the little black Moleskine book she carried in her bag, and she gave him a knowing nod. Her fingers were slim and petite, fingernails clean and manicured with a sheer polish. His eye caught hers—he saw dark sapphires through her glasses—and she smiled at him, a half smile that freed her face of its seriousness. He wondered if she remembered that time at the Academy. It was twenty years ago. He returned her smile.

“N
ATE
F
ISHER IS
huge in New York. His work is brilliant.” Alex held court among a group of German collectors at the reception afterward. Charlotte leaned in to listen, not one to miss out on gossip. Julia and Gerhardt, and a few others, trailed over and joined the conversation.

“I met Nate when I invited him to give a talk at Princeton,” Savan boasted, never forgetting to pepper his Princeton pedigree into the conversation. The brilliant and masterful artists on his roster were, in his words, utterly devoted to him; he crowed about famous dinners he had attended and the luminaries who also had been invited; he alluded to how much money he secured for a painting, believing
the higher the amount, the better the work of art. With Savan, it was impossible to tell what was true and what was fiction. Unlike Savan, Edward didn't prize money above all else, as long as his artists were happy, the gallery turned a profit, and he was able to take care of his family. And, on occasion, able to purchase an object or piece of art that lit him, on which he could gaze and dream and be transported—that was the real luxury, to be carried away.

“Nate is revolutionizing American art. No one else comes close to his self-awareness, his sense of the performative nature of it all. Don't you agree he's extraordinary, Edward?”

“Reproductions about banality. I'm not so sure.” The last person he wanted to talk about in Berlin was Fisher. Since Agnes married him four years ago, the same year Edward had taken her on, she couldn't drink a cup of coffee without his approval. Having come to the party late and making up for lost time, Fisher was known as much for his work's provocation as for his partying. Once the fashionable work took off, he was quoted in the
Observer
as saying that all he could remember of the excitement was “drinking the minibar dry.” In press photographs there was always an entourage of pretty women by his side. Though there was something about Nate's confidence and swagger that intrigued him, maybe even made him jealous, Edward wasn't impressed. The work was derivative and empty. Irony works only if there is genuine pain underneath it, and he didn't feel it.

Savan looked rattled, but soldiered on. “Whether you buy into it or not, Fisher is at Koons's level. And Agnes Murray—her work is totally different, but she's neck and neck with him, in terms of visibility. She's everywhere. She deserves to be; her work is totally brilliant. Edward represents her.”

“Agnes Murray is good,” Edward agreed, hoping his clipped answer would cut Savan off. He didn't want to encourage Savan. There was an untrustworthy air about him that made Edward not want to get too close. The last time they had drinks in the austere lobby of the Gansevoort Hotel, Savan had ordered a dirty martini, Edward was convinced, because of its sexy connotations. He smiled after he said it, stroked his chin, and salaciously popped the olive in his mouth. Edward wondered if Savan was coming on to him. Savan usually had an attractive woman on his arm, an affair that lasted for about fifteen minutes before a new girl was on the horizon, but Edward thought his heterosexuality was questionable. It wasn't that, though. Edward believed that Savan wanted to use him to gain the approval of others. At the end of the day, he knew that Savan had only his own interests at heart. Edward had to tread carefully. The art world was too insular and small for enemies.

“Gerhardt, one of yours is Colin Henning? I like his work,” Edward said, steering the conversation away from Agnes.

“If you follow me I'll show you some recent paintings.”

Edward walked beside Gerhardt, glad to escape. Since Murray's show Savan had been making himself known at Mayweather and Darby, Edward's gallery, whose star had risen along with Agnes's, where Edward was the managing partner of their small shop. As her dealer, he should have been glad when others—including Savan—recognized Agnes's brilliance. But when he thought about her, a wave of inexplicable anxiety followed. It wasn't that he didn't have other prominent artists in his stable, but Agnes was their crown jewel, and he felt he had to protect the relationship for the sake of the gallery.

Right before Edward had left for Europe, Agnes's new manager, Ryan Reynolds, called to tell him that she was weeks away from
letting him see her work for the new show. Reynolds put him on edge. The lead-up Edward had mounted for her had been tense. She was disciplined and exacting, which meant that every detail had to be thought through and obsessed over and tweaked to perfection.

Both Nate's and Agnes's art explored the legacy of 9/11. After 9/11 many artists questioned how they could make the same work they had made before. Some were consciously aware of wanting to capture or commemorate a cataclysmic event that shaped the nation's collective consciousness. Others were more aware of their own fragility and mortality. Nate was the first New York artist to show work that reflected the attacks. Blending methods of pop and conceptual art, the paintings were representative of youthful swagger and energy—that Nate was fifty seemed to make no difference. They opened a new door for artists to approach dark subject matter. Hordes flocked to his exhibition. Every young painter wanted to emulate his style. It was slightly unfortunate for Agnes, when they met again in Rome years after she'd finished her MFA, that she was also at work on paintings—hers more classical and poetic than Nate's, but no less convincing, some thought more so—influenced by the attacks.

At Columbia she'd modeled some early work after Nate's and as her mentor he'd been an early influence. Nate was quoted in the trades after her first show saying he felt that Agnes had been his most gifted student in twenty-five years of teaching. They joked that they'd fallen in love, or lust, however you chose to categorize it, over art, but if you sorted that sentence it meant they were attracted because of their admiration for each other's work. The narcissism hadn't escaped Edward. Agnes's early work had received some recognition, but it wasn't until she'd become romantically involved
with Fisher—both separating from their respective partners immediately after they returned from Rome—that her career had taken a turn. Edward suspected that each secretly competed against the other (for Nate there must have been nothing more infuriating than recognizing that his own student, twenty years younger, might be more naturally gifted), and their striving for creative excellence, power, and fame had had a positive effect on their canvases.

After taking her on, Edward attended a party in a loft on Spring Street where joints were being passed and saw the two of them, Agnes in Nate's lap, making out like teenagers on a couch the shape and color of a banana, as if acting in their own performance piece. Edward imagined them in private wrapped up in each other's thoughts, feelings, emotions all at once and it sort of thrilled him—but flaunting their attraction seemed purposely provocative. Nate broke free to chat up the new director of a posh shop in Chelsea, a stylish, lanky Brit with a fringe of dark hair around her face and the fake eyelashes of a doe, leaving Agnes alone on the couch. A look of anxious adoration lit her face when she looked at Nate. In it was an unconscious desire to want from Nate something she could never fully obtain. And it would be this suffering, Edward was convinced later, that fueled her work and gave it an aching beauty and eroticism.

Gerhardt showed Edward some of Henning's early paintings and after led him to his back office to ask in private about Agnes Murray's new work. He was interested in making an investment for a lucrative client. “Murray's historical value will depend on whether she'll be able to sustain it. What motivates her?”

Edward thought for a moment. “She says it's her father, a hotel financier with a dark past. There's a hall at Lincoln Center
he underwrote. But I wonder if her ambition arises now out of a compulsion to surpass the husband.”

Gerhardt stroked his chin and nodded.

W
HEN THEY RETURNED
, Savan was still holding court, this time talking about million-dollar deals he'd scored.

“Have you noticed that money is so much easier to talk about than art?” Gerhardt scoffed. “Some of my top collectors are prepared to buy unseen what they think will be highly competitive paintings. Not that I'm complaining.”