Art of Murder

by Jose Carlos Somoza

  ‘I have to admit that Bruno made the most of both. He travelled all over Europe and America, and set himself up for a time in New York, where he met Jacob Stein. Before that he had been in London and Paris, where he had been in touch with Tanagorsky, Kalima and Buncher. It's hardly strange that he should have been so enthusiastic about hyperdramatic art: he was born to tell other people what they should do. He had always been a painter of people, even before Kalima started to build a theory around the new movement. Bruno used his fortune to make HD the most important art of this century. The truth is, we owe a lot to Van Tysch,' Oslo ended, perhaps more cynically than he had intended.

  'This is getting us nowhere,' said Miss Wood, tapping her notebook with her pen. 'From what you tell me, Van Tysch could have as many enemies as he does admirers.' 'Exactly.'

  'We'll have to approach it differently.'

  Out in the garden, the Debbie Richards model was now completely naked, and one of the workmen was carefully folding up the painted clothing while the other helped her into her robe. Miss Wood studied the girl's physique (even barefoot, she was several centimetres taller) and vaguely wondered if Oslo thought she was equally attractive. The cerublastyne joins around the neck were clearly visible. What could her real face be like? Miss Wood did not know and did not want to know.

  As she was thinking this, she took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. Oslo thought: My God, she's so thin, so skinny. Me guessed that April Wood's nervous problems about eating must have increased in recent years. The 'guard-dog' was all skin and bone.

  He had known her as a puppy.

  It was in Rome in 2001, during a series of courses Oslo was giving on the conservation of outdoor pieces. He had never worked out what it was about this slender girl of only twenty-three that had attracted him so much. At first sight, it seemed easy enough: April Wood was beautiful, she dressed with striking elegance, and her culture and intelligence were obvious. Yet there was something within her that led people to immediately reject her. In those days she was working as the security chief for Ferrucioli, and despite the fact that she was already wealthy, she lived on her own and had no close friends. Oslo thought he had discovered what kept her isolated: a deep, slowburning hatred that was like a hidden poison. April Wood emanated hate through every pore.

  With the infinite patience he had always shown when it came to helping others, Oslo took it on himself to find the antidote. He managed to find out something about her life. He learnt that her father, an English art dealer living in Rome, had put pressure on April as an adolescent to become a canvas. He also learnt that she was being treated for a problem of nervous anorexia that dated from the time when her father wanted at all costs to make her into a work of art. 'He would call second-rate painters to sketch me in the nude’ April confessed to him one day. 'Then he took photos of me and sent them to the great masters. But I discovered just in time I didn't have the patience to be a canvas. So I devoted myself to protecting them instead.' But to her, 'protecting canvases' meant exactly that. It was as though she did not see them as human beings. The two of them often had arguments about it. Finally Oslo understood that Miss Wood's worst poison was Miss Wood. An antidote to that poison would only have done her more harm.

  When April Wood joined the Foundation as its new security director, the distance between them grew. In 2002 they saw each other still less, and by 2003 absence threw its chilly mantle over them both. The word 'end' had never been pronounced. They were still friends, but knew that anything there might have been between the two of them had finished.

  Oslo thought he was still in love with her.

  Wood put her glasses on the desk and looked at him.

  'Hirum, I'll be straight with you: the person destroying the canvases has the advantage over me.'

  'Has the advantage?'

  'One of our own people is helping him. Someone from the Foundation.'

  'My God’ murmured Oslo.

  For a tiny instant, a split second, he thought she had become a little girl once more. Oslo knew that behind her indomitable will there was concealed a poor, lonely and frightened creature which occasionally surfaced in her gaze, but which he was astounded to see at this very moment. But that moment soon passed. Wood took control of her facial expression once more. Not even an expert in cerublastyne could mould a mask as perfect as April Wood's real features, thought Hirum Oslo.

  ‘I have no idea who it is’ she went on. 'It could be someone in the pay of our competitors. Someone anyway who is in a position to pass on restricted information about when our security people are working, the places where we have our models for safe-keeping, and lots more. We're being sold, Hirum, from inside and outside the Foundation.'

  'Does Stein know?'

  'He was the first person I told. But he refused to help. He's not even going to try to get the next exhibition postponed. Neither Stein nor the Maestro wants to get mixed up in this. The problem when you work for great artists is that you have to sort your life out for yourself. They're on another plane. They see me as a guard dog - they even call me that - and I don't blame them: that is exactly what they employ me to be. And until now they've been happy with what I've done. But now I'm on my own. And I need help.'

  'You've always had me, April. And I'm here for you now.'

  They heard laughter out in the garden. It came from young people of both sexes. They were talking and laughing like students on a picnic as they came up to the summerhouse. They were wearing sports clothes and carrying bags on their shoulders, but their skin looked as shiny as polished mirrors in the light from the electric bulbs that had just come on among the trees. They had an almost supernatural appearance, like angels with well-defined bodies, beings from a far-off universe that Hirum Oslo and Miss Wood felt exiled from. They found it hard to look on them without regret. Oslo muttered an apology to Miss Wood, and went to the door.

  Wood understood at once that this must be a daily ritual: Oslo's paintings were saying goodbye to him. He talked to them, smiled and joked. She thought of her own house back in London. She had more than forty artworks, almost half of them human ornaments. Some of them were so expensive they carried on in their poses even when she was not there, even if she was away for several weeks. But Miss Wood never said a word to any of them. She crushed out her cigarettes in Ashtrays that were naked men, lit Lamps that were adolescents with depilated, virgin sexual organs, slept next to a painting of three youngsters painted blue who were in perpetual balance, washed alongside two kneeling girls who held gold soap dishes in their mouths, but at no time, not even when they finally left her house at the end of a long day's work, did it ever occur to her to talk to them. But here was Oslo, relating to his paintings like an affectionate father.

  After saying goodbye to them, Hirum Oslo sat down again, and lit the desk lamp. The light flamed in Miss Wood's cold blue eyes.

  'What time do you have to leave?' he asked.

  it doesn't matter. I've got a private plane waiting for me in Plymouth. And if I don't feel like driving, I can call a chauffeur to come and pick me up. Don't worry.'

  Oslo put the tips of his finger together. His face showed he was worried about something.

  ‘I suppose you've thought of going to the police.'

  Miss Wood's smile was heavy with tiredness.

  'This guy has all the police forces of Europe on his trail, Hirum. We're getting help from organisations and defence departments that only swing into action in very special cases, when the security or the cultural heritage of one of their member states is threatened. Globalisation has made the methods of a Sherlock Holmes seem very old-fashioned, I suppose, but I'm one of those who prefer old-fashioned methods. Besides, their reports end up with the crisis cabinet, and I'm convinced one of the members of that cabinet is the person who is helping our suspect. But worst of all, I have no time.' She paused, and then added: 'We suspect that he's going to try to destroy one of the paintings in the new exhibition, and that he's going to do it now, during
the exhibition. Perhaps in a week or two, perhaps earlier. He might even attack on the day of the opening. I can't wait much longer. Today is Tuesday 11 July, Hirum. There are four days left. I am des-per-ate. My people are working on it day and night. We've devised some very complex protection plans, but this guy has a plan of his own, and he'll dodge us just as he has until now. He's going to destroy another painting. And I have to stop him.'

  Oslo thought for a minute.

  'Tell me a bit about his modus operandi.'

  Wood told him about the state the paintings had been found in, and the use of the canvas cutter. She added:

  'He records the voices of the canvases saying weird things which we reckon he must force them to read. I've brought you written copies of both recordings.'

  She pulled some sheets of paper out of her bag and passed them to him. By the time Oslo had finished reading them, the garden was dark and silent.

  The art that survives is the art that has died,' he read aloud. 'That is odd. It sounds like a declaration of principles of hyperdramatic art. Tanagorsky always said that HD art would not survive because it's live art. It may sound like a paradox, but that's the way it is: it's made from real flesh-and-blood people, and so is ephemeral.'

  Miss Wood had abandoned her notebook, and was leaning forward, elbows on the edge of the desk.

  'Hirum, do you think that the recorded phrases reveal a deep artistic knowledge?'

  Oslo raised his eyebrows and thought before he responded.

  'It's hard to say, but I think so. "Art is also destruction," it says further on. "Before it used to be just that." And it names cave artists, and the Egyptians. I see it this way: until the Renaissance, broadly speaking, artists worked for "destruction" or death: bison on cave walls, figures on tombs, statues of terrifying gods, medieval descriptions of hell . . . But from the Renaissance onwards, art began to work for life. And that went on until the Second World War, believe it or not. After that conflict, there was a shrinking of awareness. Painters lost their virginity, became pessimistic, no longer believed in their own craft. Even today, well into the twenty-first century, we're still suffering the consequences. All of us are the inheritors of that dreadful war. This is our Nazi inheritance, April. This is what the Nazis have achieved ...'

  Oslo's voice had diminished to almost a whisper. It was as dark as the nightfall closing in around them. He was speaking without looking at Miss Wood, staring instead at his desk.

  'We've always thought humanity was a mammal which could lick its own wounds. But in fact we're as fragile as a huge painting, a beautiful but terrifying mural painting which has been creating itself over the centuries. That's what makes us so fragile: slashes on the canvas of humanity are hard to repair. And the Nazis slashed the canvas to ribbons. Our convictions were smashed, and their fragments scattered throughout history.

  There was nothing we could do with beauty, except to grieve over it. There was no way we could get back to Leonardo, Raphael, Velazquez, or Renoir. Humanity became a mutilated survivor whose eyes are wide open to horror. And that's the Nazis' real victory. Artists still suffer from that inheritance, April. In that sense, in only that sense, it's true to say that Hitler won the war forever.'

  He raised his sad eyes to look at Miss Wood, who sat listening to him silently.

  'Just like in the university, I'm talking too much,' he said with a smile.

  'No, go on, please.'

  Oslo stared down at the elaborate knob of his cane while he went on.

  'Art has always been very sensitive to the currents of history. After the war, painting fell apart; canvases became daubs of bright colours, a sort of crazy revolution of amorphous shapes. Art movements and tendencies lasted less and less time. One painter even said, quite rightly, that the avantgardes existed simply to provide material for the following day's tradition. There were action paintings, live art, performances, pop art and art that defied classification. Schools were born and died in a day. Each painter became his own school, and the only acceptable Rile was that there were no rules. Then hyperdramatism came on the scene: and that in many ways is closer to destruction than any other artistic movement.'

  'How's that?' Miss Wood asked.

  'According to Kalima, the great theorist of HD art, humanity is not only contrary to art, it cancels it out. That's what he says in his books, I'm not inventing it. To put it simply: an HD work is more artistic the less human it is. That is what hyperdramatic exercises are aimed at: stripping the model of their condition as a person, getting rid of their convictions, their emotional stability, their willpower, undermining their dignity in order to transform them into a thing they can make art out of. "We have to destroy the human being in order to create the work," say the hyperdramatists. That's what the art of our time has become, April. That is the art of our world, of this new century of ours. And not only have they dispensed with human beings: they've also dispensed with all the other arts. We live in a hyperdramatic world.'

  Oslo paused. Miss Wood could not help thinking yet again of the Debbie Richards portrait. That woman who was more attractive than she was, whom Hirum had on show in his house to remember her.

  'As is usually the case,' Oslo went on, 'this savage tendency has given rise to opposite reactions. On the one hand, people who believe you have to go to the absolute extreme and degrade the human being to an unbelievable extent: that was how art-shocks, hypertragedies, animarts and so on were born, and human artefacts ... and the corollary, the ultimate degradation of stained art .. . But on the other, there are those who believe you can create works of art with human beings without having to degrade or humiliate them. And that's how natural-humanism came about.' He raised his hands in the air, and smiled. 'But I'm not trying to convert you.'

  'You mean,' Miss Wood said, 'that whoever wrote those texts was thinking in hyperdramatic terms?'

  'Yes, but there are strange phrases. For example, the one at the end of both texts: "If the figures die, the works persist." I can't see how an HD work can persist if its figures die. That's taking Tanagorsky's paradox to the extreme. They are confused texts, and I'd like more time to be able to analyse them at greater leisure. At any rate, I don't think we should take them literally. I remember that in Alice, Humpty Dumpty reckoned he could make words mean whatever he wanted. Something similar is going on here. Only the person who wrote them can tell us what he meant.'

  'Hirum,' Miss Wood said after another short pause, 'I've read that Deflowering and Monsters were considered very special in Van Tysch's output. Why is that?'

  'It's true, they are very different from the rest of his production. In his Treatise on Hyperdramatic Art, Van Tysch says that Deflowering is based on a vision he had as a child, when he was going to Edenburg castle with his father. Maurits wanted Bruno to observe him at work so that he could learn the skills of the trade. Bruno used to go with him every summer in his school holidays, and they would walk together along a path bordered with flowers. In one part, there was a bank of wild narcissi, and one day Van Tysch thought he saw a young girl standing among the flowers. He might really have seen her, but he thinks it must have been a dream. The fact is that Deflowering became for him a symbol of his childhood. The smell of wet wood that the work gives off... that the work gave off... is a reference to the summer storm that broke over Edenburg on the day he saw the vision.' Oslo twisted his lips. ‘I met Annek when Van Tysch was painting that work with her. The poor child thought he cared for her. And he used her feelings in his work.'

  There was another pause. Miss Wood was staring at him out of the shadows.

  In Monsters his aim was to represent Richard Tysch, and perhaps Maurits as well. Of course, the Walden brothers did not look anything like them, but it was a caricature, a sort of artistic revenge against people who had been influential in his life. He chose a couple of psychopaths and hung a criminal record round their necks which has still not been properly confirmed. The Walden brothers were capable of a lot of things, but Van Tysch probably made
them seem even more perverse than they were by using the notoriety of the case in which they were accused of murdering Helga Blanchard and her son. So the comparison between the two figures in the work of art and those in his past is perhaps concealing something else. Maybe Van Tysch is trying to tell us that neither Richard Tysch nor Maurits were as evil and perverse in reality, as they are when he remembered and painted them: deformed, grotesque, pederasts, criminals, just like one another. The only link between Monsters and Deflowering then is the past. No other painting he has done is so directly related to his own life.'

  'What about "Rembrandt"?' Miss Wood leaned forward in her seat. 'Do you know the description of the works in his new collection?'

  'I've heard something about it, like all the critics.'

  'I've brought you a catalogue with the most up-to-date information,' she said, pulling a black pamphlet out of her bag. She opened it out on the desk. 'There's a short descripdon of each work. There are thirteen of them. I need you to tell me which of them, in your opinion, could be specially related to Van Tysch's past like those other two.'