She shakes her head and he drives off.
The group of young men have dispersed to their private pleasures. She thinks of Theo, her godson, the radiant boy who chose a half-life in the shadows. Another vote for mediocrity. Such a denial of talent and autonomy. She turns and heads back to the main road.
* * *
—
A week after her confrontation with Kristof, two letters arrived at the studio—the first from him, a handwritten, wheedling and reproachful request for her return, warning of the consequences if she stayed away; the second, official, with a central London postmark, was, she assumed, from the lawyer he threatened her with. She didn’t answer the first or open the second. She didn’t have time.
She went back to the canvas and Luka began to film her as she painted another gelsemium flower.
“Tell me about Florian Kiš,” he said.
She sighed.
“Not now, Luka.”
“But when?” There was an unattractive whine in his voice.
“Don’t you think the world has heard enough about Florian Kiš? He was in my life for a matter of months.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. Then tell me more about your influences.”
This was better. She’d never had the chance to speak about all this in any depth before. She put down the magnifying glass and spoke directly to the camera, describing her visit to Karnak, and the Temple of Thutmose III. Luka didn’t need to know that Kristof had taken her there on honeymoon.
“The bas-relief carvings of nearly three hundred plant species date from the fifteenth century BC. Human preoccupation with this branch of the natural world is not new. What is new is our increasing lack of interest. Plant blindness.”
She spoke about the medieval herbals, the Renaissance Italians who used flowers as allegorical adjuncts in religious art, and the Dutch stilleven, with a sense that her exposition was a fitting commentary on the magisterial, time-transcending nature of her work.
“The whole tradition of still life—nature morte, inanimate or dead nature to the French—sprang from the human impulses to display and to classify. There’s a preoccupation with the richness of the natural world and the fleeting quality of life. By fixing in perpetuity the velvet bloom on a fat grape, the dewdrop on a petal, we cheat time.”
Luka stood, rapt and silent, as the camera did its work.
She told him about the xenia paintings: “gifts for visitors—groaning boards of native country produce, beakers of wine, luscious fruit, cheese, game and flowers from the boastful host’s estate; and the vanitas, like xenia, with the addition of a skull to remind us that we go to the grave empty-handed.”
Only once before did she have such a captive audience. In Paris, long ago, Theo had been so eager for details of the tradition she drew on in her work.
“Then there were cabinets of curiosities,” she continued, “exotic plants brought back from the new colonies, the medieval herbals and botanists’ encyclopedias, the fruit and flower images used by painters of religious scenes—the Annunciation lilies—and by the rhyparographos—painters of filth.”
“Filth?” Luka said, a sudden brightness in his voice.
“Not that kind.” She laughed. “Sordid or vulgar, meaning commonplace, subjects—nature brought into the everyday human context, the single stem of mallow in a jar in the tavern, the scattered posy of wild flowers by the cobbler’s last; pleasure in the humdrum and the domestic, once God and his cohorts were out of the picture.”
“Right.”
“The Dutch market scenes are another example…” She could see he’d lost interest.
“What about the critics?” he asked.
She looked up sharply, from lens to cameraman.
“What about the critics?”
“Those people, reviewers, who say you’re playing safe? That it’s all just decoration? Copying?”
His interruption was an affront.
She turned her back on him to load a squirrel-hair liner with colour and began to conjure the flower’s bamboo-like leaves with light strokes. When she finally spoke again, her voice was cool.
“There were those who thought painting should only cover religious themes. Then the mortal human form became an acceptable subject, but nature morte has always been a poor relation. Mimesis, the skilful rendering of the natural and material world, was dismissed as mimicry, though Caravaggio said it was as challenging to paint flowers as it was to paint figures.”
“And today’s critics?” He wasn’t going to let this go.
“Today’s critics think seeing, and the precise rendering of what we see, is redundant; it’s what the artist feels that matters and how much of themselves, fanny and fundament, they’re prepared to expose in the funhouse.”
“But Florian Kiš—”
“Luka!” She put down her brush.
“It’s all part of your work, your story,” Luka protested, following her with the camera.
This conversation was over, as far as she was concerned.
But Luka pushed on.
“Well, Brian Sewell, for instance. Didn’t he say your paintings were ‘Seductive trivialities. Women’s pictures’?”
What hurt was not Sewell’s old barbs but the fact that Luka had seen them and committed them to memory.
“He was no friend to women artists.”
Luka didn’t let up.
“And Ellery Quinn. Didn’t he write that you were ‘an ape of nature’ and your work was ‘slavishly mimetic, fit only for children’s books, haberdashery and the wrapping paper industry’?”
Eve glared at the camera, as if the inanimate box of circuitry, not her lover, was generating these offensive questions.
“You read Quinn’s review of my Sigmoid show?” she said, retrieving her brush. “ ‘Not art imitating life, but life itself.’ He finally got it.”
Luka adjusted the focus.
“But he’s your dealer’s latest lover. Or occasional lover. He would say that about Hans’s client, wouldn’t he?”
Eve threw down her brush again.
“Luka, stop that now. What’s got into you?”
He fixed the camera back on the tripod.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wind you up. These are the sort of questions people are going to ask. This stuff is out there. You might as well tackle what they say head-on. Besides, I want to know how you handle all that.”
She picked up the brush, dipped it in turps and cleaned it off with a rag.
“A lot of people say a lot of things,” she said. “But you’ve got to be tough, build a carapace, stay true to your vision and keep going.”
“Did you ever have doubts?” He was filming again.
“About my work? No never. It’s not a small undertaking—opening the eye to the intricacy and wonder of the natural world in a plant-blind age.”
“Maybe you should explain plant blindness more fully at this point?” he suggested.
She was glad to be on sure ground again.
“No one truly sees flowers any more,” she said, addressing the camera. “They’re not big enough, showy or threatening enough to demand our attention and they’re vanishing from our view. Their names are vanishing from our culture too.”
“Which names?”
“Bluebell, buttercup, catkin, cowslip…”
He paused the camera.
“What’s a cowslip?”
She was relieved to see he was laughing.
22
The following morning, another letter arrived in the studio. It was a personal invitation from Wanda Wilson for the opening of her show at the Hayward. Even after the long passage of time, Eve recognised the loopy handwriting. Well, at least Wanda was addressing her directly and acknowledging her autonomy at last. All must be forgiven.
“Do come!
” was the scribbled note on the back of the printed invitation. The Five Ages of Woman, first shown at the Whitney fifteen years ago, was being revived in London and, the invitation stated, it was “one of the most hotly anticipated cultural events of the year.” Eve threw the card in the bin. Luka, looking down and recognising the gallery’s logo, fished it out.
“You can’t turn this down!” he said. “Invitations for her shows are gold dust.”
Eve shook her head.
“I don’t have time. And neither do you.”
“Oh, come on!”
She didn’t tell him that she would rather have a tooth extracted than turn up to one of Wanda Wilson’s shows.
“Seriously, Luka, we have too much to do here.”
“You’re ashamed of me. You don’t want to be seen out with me. I know.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she said, leaning towards him for a kiss. “Of course I’m not ashamed of you.”
He averted his face and shrugged her off. She watched him return to the herbarium with the heavy steps and hunched shoulders of a sulky teenager.
Then it occurred to her: why not go to the Hayward? They’d been cooped up, working hard for so long. It would make him happy. This would be her response to Kristof’s letters. She’d be curious to see Wanda again close up. Clearly, the old fraud no longer bore a grudge against her after all these years. Wasn’t she working with Kristof now on her Art Ranch? Eve would go to the ridiculous show. With Luka on her arm. Time to come out of the shadows.
On the night of the opening, however, her defiance ebbed away in the horizontal rain. She walked with Luka to the front of the long line outside the gallery, pushed through the doors into the foyer, shook out her sodden umbrella and showed her invitation to a burly man with a headset and a sheaf of paper. He looked for her name on his list and shook his head.
“VIPs only,” he said, waving through Solokoff, the Russian oligarch, and a fresh batch of lingerie models.
He directed Eve back outside to rejoin the end of the queue.
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s do it!” said Luka, opening the umbrella again.
There should be an upper age limit on queuing—say, twenty. The last time Eve could remember standing in line was as a student in her late teens, hoping to get into a Covent Garden club. Most of this crowd, jostling under umbrellas, were in their twenties and thirties—younger and, she was peeved to observe, hipper than the crowd that attended her own show.
The patrons, critics, sponsors and gallerists who were at the Sigmoid would be at the Hayward for Wanda too, but they’d skip the queues and be ushered straight into her presence. Perhaps this was Wanda’s revenge after all—consigning her old rival to the role of humble congregant, milling at the back of the nave with the multitudes.
They inched through the puddles towards the entrance, Luka as excited as a child on his way to the circus, Eve fuming. A breathless young man in his twenties wearing an orange sweatshirt with a “DOUBLE U” logo walked down the line handing out flyers for Wanda’s next show—Artist on the Edge/The Death of Mimesis. “A multimedia durational work. The artist as catalyst, medium and subject. Pioneering relational work to be presented simultaneously at leading European and American venues. Summer 2019.”
More tosh.
“That’ll be amazing,” Luka said.
Once they got to the door, things looked up; Eve was recognised by a pale, wide-eyed young woman with a pierced lip who was directing the queue. She was wearing an ill-fitting vintage frock and neon-pink baseball boots. An art student.
The girl gushed, apologising to Eve for the wait—“I’m so sorry you’ve had to stand out there in the rain.”
Champagne, and a little respect, eased the discomfort.
In the first room, on three walls, floor to ceiling, a silent video collage showed hundreds of infant girls of all hues and ethnicities: in nappies or naked; some smiling, their hands clasping and unclasping like fronds of sea anemones; some wailing, faces contorted, pumping their fists with helpless fury, as if the veil had parted and they’d glimpsed the indignities that lay ahead—No! No! No! Over this kaleidoscopic baby dumbshow was a soundtrack of the amplified discordant tinkling of a child’s broken music box. “Für Elise.” As the spectators walked round the gallery, their heads were brushed by thousands of pink dummies suspended from the ceiling on pink ribbons.
Luka was enchanted.
“Wow!” he kept saying as he gazed at the videos then up at the ribbons. He raised his arm and ran his hand through them, setting the dummies swinging and spinning.
“Wow!”
Through the crowd, Eve glimpsed Hans with Ellery Quinn and made her way over to them. She looked back to see Luka talking to a sleek young redhead in a persimmon suit. She looked like a stewardess on a budget airline. The girl turned and waved to Eve. It was Belle. What was she doing here? And what was she wearing? Her clipboard and “Double U” armband suggested some kind of official role.
Eve turned back to Hans. Her brief eye roll was met with his arched eyebrow. Quinn nodded towards the video collage of baby pictures.
“An infomercial for contraception?” he said.
They laughed and walked together into the next room, where their feet crunched over sugary gravel; tens of thousands of pastel Love Heart candies which, the exhibition notes revealed, would be gradually crushed to powder by visitors’ feet and replenished every two days. More silent videos were projected on three walls: a collage of teenaged girls pouting for selfies, applying cosmetics, giggling, swooning over photos of pop stars, trying on clothes.
The soundtrack was of amplified gasps and sighs—teenaged girls, one assumed, engaged in sex. From the ceiling, hanging from lengths of string, were thousands of red-stained tampons: not Wanda’s own, as they would have been in the old days. Wanda was long past the sanitary-product years and had moved on from her signature “bio-art”—exemplified in her nineties Curse exhibition, with nude self-portraits crudely rendered in the artist’s menstrual blood.
Wanda would have needed to enlist an army of young women to produce the quantity of gore required for this show. There were certainly enough potential recruits, legions of gullible female art students like the girl on the door with her perforated mouth. But, in these hygiene-obsessed days, gallery health and safety regulations would be unlikely to permit verisimilitude. No, the dangling tampons were bright, clean, unsoiled—a rich alizarin crimson rather than the haematite-tinged real thing Wanda had displayed to an admiring audience thirty years ago.
Luka caught up with Eve.
“Amazing!” He gazed up at the encrimsoned curtain above their heads.
“Mmm. Was that Belle?”
“Her temp job. Arts marketing and events.”
“I didn’t recognise her in her corporate outfit.”
He laughed.
“She scrubs up well, doesn’t she? That’s her thing. She’s got her costume and she’s playing her part.”
“Well, if she’s getting paid for it…”
“It’s the best gig she’s had all year. Meeting and greeting…Wanda Wilson.”
“Lucky girl!”
23
Under a railway bridge, Eve stops to retrieve her umbrella. The sleet has reverted to drenching rain. The graffiti arabesques on the red-brick walls remind her of the eerie prehistoric caves in Patagonia, where early men and women left their marks by stencilling round their hands with paint sprayed through a pipe. Eve steps over a pile of filthy rags, which begin to stir, and realises she’s intruding in a dormitory for the homeless. She hurries on.
* * *
—
The theme of the next room at the Hayward wasn’t hard to guess, the amplified groaning and yelling declared it before they walked in: motherhood. The centrepiece was a life-size plaster Madonna and Child, plundered from some decommissioned church. On
ce more, three walls of silent film: childbirth—a blur of flesh and blood and agonised maternal faces, in contrast to the serenely saccharine centrepiece. And above them? Suspended from the ceiling were thousands of soiled nappies. Again, in her early days Wanda would have gone for the real thing but here the nappies were stained with sloppily applied Vandyke brown and ochre gouache.
Eve spotted Ines Alvaro in the far corner of the room, gazing upwards, as if contemplating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Ines caught Eve’s eye and waved. She was coming over.
“Are you done?” asked Luka, who was less enchanted by the stained nappies swinging, pendulum-like, above his head.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Eve. “That woman, Ines, she’s a stalker.”
They moved into the next room and found they’d entered a sealed gallery—a black box, silent but for the steady whirr of two industrial heaters. No videos, no caterwauling soundtracks, no apparently insanitary objects. Nothing but the stifling heat—a woman’s middle, invisible years once her biological destiny has been fulfilled, when the hot flushes are a cruel mockery, the last hurrah of those dwindling inner fires. Cunning old Wanda—she’d monetised her menopause, and at no effort at all. Here was nothing, a vacancy bounded by plain walls, presented as art. Some wealthy patron, Solokoff perhaps, would pay an absurd sum to re-create this experience of female midlife sensory deprivation in an unused room in his Holland Park mansion.
Eve was glad to get out but there was one more room to endure before they could have another drink.
The massed choral music was absurdly portentous, and familiar—the soundtrack of a suburban Black Mass, or the signature tune for a meeting of the Croydon branch of the Aleister Crowley Appreciation Society: Carmina Burana. Here was Death, or particularly, Woman’s Death. Still images (it would have been hard, even for Wanda, to get clearance for videos hot from hospice or mortuary) of the dead and dying in drawings, paintings and old photographs. From Millais’ flower-strewn, semi-submerged Ophelia, Salgado’s Vanitas, with smug angel supervising a heap of gold trinkets and human skulls, and Posada’s Calavera Catrina engraving, a 1913 skeleton parody of fashionable womanhood, to Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait as a fatally wounded deer.
Nightshade Page 17
