by Paul Theroux
Compared to this, trashing a Francis Bacon was negligible. Bacon himself regularly destroyed paintings he’d done that didn’t suit him, and laughed when the critics howled. The destruction had not diminished him; it had made him loom larger.
But though the historical precedent for the destruction of artwork was ancient, the novelty that Minor Watt introduced was his using his own art collection, piece by piece; and while it seemed a form of insanity, it was both unprecedented and lawful.
He felt no remorse—far from it. He was suffused with an unexpected sense of power, greater than anything he’d felt in acquiring the works. He knew the joy of a winning bid, the cry of “Sold!” The arrival of the wooden crate, the dismantling, the revealing of the painting, the urn, the skull, the statue, the goblet. But destroying any of these things gave him the intense pleasure that could only compare with devouring something rare—eating an endangered animal, the feeling the Chinese had when feasting on a bear paw or a moose nose or the liver of a tiger.
He envisioned no end to it. He had enough money to go on buying art. The disgusted foretaste of destroying a thing he saw in a salesroom or a catalogue filled him with an urgency to buy it.
The discouraged Bennett Hembergs said, “It’s not yours—art belongs to the world. We are merely the preservers, keeping these pieces for future generations.”
“I disagree,” Minor Watt said in his quiet way. “I am disproving that. By destroying them I am making them mine.”
He did not say (though he implied it) that it was his intention that no one would ever see them again. Or hold them or touch them or smell them—the smell of such antiques was distinct and musty, like that of leaf mold or dried meat. No one would bear witness to them. Knowing they were irreplaceable, he did his best to prevent anyone from photographing them whole.
“You’re like a murderer, a rapist who kills his victims!”
He laughed—the tyrant laugh. “You don’t know what murder is!” These were things that belonged to him. “No one can prevent me from destroying my own property, providing I do it in safety.”
The great pity, in Minor Watt’s mind, was that he was the true connoisseur: he had studied these pieces with such care that no one saw as deeply into them as he did. “What a loss,” they said, but they didn’t know the half of it. The witnesses, the gallery owners, the collectors, were not ignorant, but neither did they fully understand the works—their historical importance, even their monetary value.
Art critics condemned him; his name became a euphemism for gratuitous violation. He was denounced and vilified. Yet he gloried in the abuse. It proved how successful he’d been: he wanted his efforts to be known. And, by the way, it showed how wealthy he was—the word “potlatch” was used for his destruction made into a ritual. He’d caused the moneymen to be afraid and, in their cowering, to look small and mean.
Not everyone howled. Some women were attracted to him for these acts of destruction. Unstable women, on the whole, too eager, excited by the danger, by being so close to the fires that scorched his paintings, the dazzle of the knife blades, the clubs that smashed the pots. They were like the panting people who chased fire engines or joined window-breaking mobs or wrote letters to serial killers, falling in love with them, marrying them on death row. The women were perhaps destructive themselves and had lived by ruining other people—but not on this scale. The ingenuity of Minor Watt shredding his paintings, smashing his porcelain, crushing the decorated skulls, microwaving his majolica, roasting his Polynesian clubs in his fireplace, had not occurred to them—they didn’t own any works of art. He avoided these women. What did they know?
And at the parties he attended he was treated as notorious. Stab a Stella and people flee—or hang around, transfixed. He stopped going to parties. “Charisma vampires,” he said; they sapped his energy.
What alarmed the art world was that Minor Watt had the means to replace these works. When he showed up at auctions the other bidders glared at him, and when he was successful gloom descended on the salesroom, for it was known that the piece he’d bought—painting, book, pot, sculpture, dueling pistol, helmet, whatever—would be shattered to bits. And if it happened to be a rare South Indian bronze, it would be blowtorched into a sorry lump of unrecognizable metal. Ownership to Minor Watt meant oblivion.
Some works cried out to be destroyed. Certain statues, certain paintings, the carvings that collectors referred to as “exquisite.” They seemed defiant, and not just the delicate ones but the robust images too. The broad black strokes in a wall-sized Rothko seemed to stare at Minor Watt and say, “Kick me.”
Had these artworks been people, he would have been arrested, convicted of murder, and imprisoned. But what he did was regarded by most people who knew of it as worse than murder. Yet he was almost delirious in his innocence, free to slash paintings and shatter gold Mayan ornaments and all the rest, because the objects belonged to him.
Furious people visited him to vent their feelings. Even a policeman: “Your neighbors are complaining . . . smoke . . . noise.” He laughed: what noise? Even stepped on, a Meissen shepherdess made less noise than someone chewing corn flakes. “Your neighbors said they heard gunshots.”
“Yes. I blew holes in a Jasper Johns. It seemed created to be shot at. Then I burned it. I have a permit to carry a gun.”
“I’ll need to write it up. It was a painting?”
“It was a target.”
The sound of the gunshots had rippled through him and swelled him with a sense of power. He felt bigger, stronger, more visible; his name was on people’s lips. He was better known, more famous, as a destroyer of art than he’d ever been as a collector. And that was another motivator, the conceits of the other collectors, the presumption, the calculation. He laughed when one of them said, “A piece just like that sold at auction for a million-two.” In the past they had ignored him, taken him for a philistine. What philistine? His eye was unerring in choosing the greatest works to destroy—the best went first, then the lesser works. In this way he proved that he had taste. Had he been a philistine, he would not have discriminated. But he was a connoisseur, and he brought all his connoisseurship to his destruction.
Some dealers—not many—avoided him. Some auction houses tried publicly to bar him from sales. But because of the money he was willing to pay, in a period when business had never been worse, he was discreetly welcome, usually after hours, in the galleries and studios. And he was willing to pay more than anyone else. He didn’t haggle. If he saw a thing he liked, he bought it without hesitating.
He grew to love the twitch of greedy anticipation in the moist eyes of the art dealer on his entering the gallery, the subtle hints that a certain object might be worthy of his attention—not the best piece in the place, but always the most expensive.
This afternoon the dealer was Tony Faris. He had an early Hopper. He called to his assistant, Mara, to prop the painting on an easel.
Buyers and collectors said, “Can you make me a price?” or “What’s the best you can do?”
Minor Watt smiled at Faris and said, “How much?”
The price was named. He studied Faris’s mouth uttering the big number, the dry lips, the licking tongue, the jerking head.
“I’ll write you a check,” he said. Then, because Faris had hesitated and Mara had glanced at her boss, he said, “How do you want me to pay for it?”
He loved the way Faris said, “Cash is good.”
“Send it to me. Pack it well.”
He knew he was sending the piece to its doom. They all did. Collaborators!
“I know you’ll be happy with it.”
Happy, yes, because if it were not of such great quality, he would not have bought it, would not trouble himself to slash it, burn it, pour acid over it, melt it, batter it with a hammer.
Mara brought the Hopper to him in a taxi. He invited her up to his apartment and led her through part of his collection, his usual challenge, daring her to identify this or that piece.
“Naga,” she said, correctly, of a red-beaded necklace in a framed box. “Reverse-glass painting, Hanuman,” and “Mughal khanjar, real jewels in the hilt.” She seemed reverential, even moved by the objects. “And that is a dah,” she said of a silver dagger.
“You know what you’re looking at.”
“Many of these things have a practical use.” She was glancing from the Marquesan club to the Dan mask to a Zulu headrest. “Not art objects, but useful tools,” she said. “To you they are emblems of power.”
He lifted the Marquesan u’u and wondered if he should smash it.
“The language of things,” she said.
He knew why the dealers were so willing to consign these artworks to oblivion. The money he paid was one incentive, but there was a larger issue: the scarcer the work, the rarer the masterpiece in any area, the greater the demand and the higher the price. A finite number of Hoppers existed. Minor Watt’s Hopper was an oil the painter had executed in Rockland, Maine, in the summer of 1926—moored fishing boats, a clutter of drooping telephone wires, the serene old culture, the ugly tilted crosstrees. Hopper had spent less than three months in Rockland. He’d done fewer than a dozen paintings. The destruction of this painting increased the value of all the rest of them, probably a better one that Faris had kept for himself.
The Noland prices rose on the news that he’d wrecked two early targets. He pounded his Gandharan Maitreya figure, a “Buddha of the future,” into fragments and the market for these strangely Hellenic central Asian sculptures became buoyant.
He had never collected coins, inros, netsukes, perfume bottles; apart from a few pieces he’d given Sonia, jewelry left him cold. And what sort of spectacle would they make on a bonfire or in a crucible—a sparklet, a fizz, a bad smell. Even melted, the heaviest earrings—West African or Indian—would amount to no more than a twisted nugget of gold. He craved a visible triumph, a blaze, a marble statue reduced to powder, to be sneezed into nothingness.
The painter Tristram Cowley invited him to his studio, and Minor Watt sat while Cowley showed him his latest work. Minor Watt admired the detail, made comments. He knew what these painters wanted him to do—buy a picture, not the best one. They held back. Minor Watt was patient. He chatted, waiting until the better pictures were slid out and leaned against the wall. Cowley’s pieces were based on x-rays. Minor Watt chose Compound Fracture.
“You know where to send it.”
Cowley knew what would happen to Compound Fracture. And he knew what would happen to his reputation, to the value of his work: it would be a breakthrough.
But such a painter was not the best witness to the destruction. Critics were excellent—they grieved. And the most knowledgeable critics were the best. They were able to appreciate the worth of the pieces. They could put a price tag on them, but few of them could afford to buy them, and so they were truly shocked to see Minor Watt slash them to rags.
After a nighttime visit to the New York studio of another painter, Minor Watt was walking to the corner to find a taxi when he was set upon and pushed to the sidewalk by two men. At that moment, a police cruiser happened to drift past, interrupting the assault, though the two attackers slipped between buildings and got away.
“You okay?” one cop asked. “They get anything?”
“I’m fine. I have my wallet. My watch.” Patting himself, Minor Watt was glad that he felt no pain.
“I guess we got here just in time. Lucky. They could have done some damage.”
Minor Watt smiled at that notion—that they might have broken his bones. Maybe they were men who objected to what he was doing. Or maybe they were thugs looking for trouble.
It happened again—this time a gunshot fired into his car, which was parked in a public lot. He was not in the car, but the bullet through the windshield entered at the level of his head. That was a message: not a random act of violence but an attempted murder. He lost count of the people who would be glad to see him dead. Sonia would smile and tell people what a bastard he was—and never mention how they had loved each other. He bought a bulletproof car and hired a bodyguard, and, secure, he was gleeful, thinking that there were people who were so outraged by the destruction of his artworks that they were prepared to kill him.
The phone rang in his bulletproof car, a woman. “This is the Tony Faris gallery. Mr. Faris would like to speak with you.”
“Put him on,” Minor Watt said.
“Right away. But I just wanted to say that I read about that trouble you had and I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks for noticing. You’re Mara?”
“You remember.”
“‘The language of things.’ I liked that.”
Then Faris was on the line, saying, “Are you all right?”
Other people called—dealers, galleries, auctioneers, painters, sculptors. In almost every case, they were people who wished to sell him work, all of them well aware of his plans for the piece: the knife, the hammer, the acid bath, the crucible, the bonfire, the oven.
Sonia called. She sounded terrified, and her anxious questions told him that she was afraid he might hurt her.
After the mugging and the gunshot, his protective measures took so much of his time that for three weeks or more he did not destroy anything. In this period of reflection he realized that he would never run out of works to destroy. He felt a twinge of inhibition. Faris’s sale of the Edward Hopper gave him his first intimation. Even if he concentrated on, say, Chola bronzes—a niche of Indian art—he’d only find at most a dozen masterpieces. Museums and die-hard collectors had the rest, which would be the more valuable for his destruction of the others.
And so he stopped and pondered what to do next. This pause proved accidentally helpful. He saw that he was regarded as a dominant force in the art world, almost as though his destruction was a form of art criticism, causing fear and gratitude. His spell of doing nothing created suspense. He liked the idea that he was spreading alarm by not lifting a finger, that he’d become a symbol of intimidation.
I have not drawn blood, he thought, not one drop. I have not hurt a single person physically. I have not put a hand on anyone. I have never raised my voice. I have not cursed, nor shown anger, nor damaged anyone else’s property.
The paradox he saw in the partial destruction of his collection was that he had helped to stimulate the art market and inflate some prices. This was a drawback, if not a defeat. In his period of inaction and watchfulness, his phone warbled all the time—dealers chattering to do business—and he was tempted. But he knew their motives. He was being used. Perhaps this was to be expected, but he saw it as a diminution of his power. He despised them, but he began to doubt himself for having set a wayward impulse loose.
Escaping his apartment, leaving his phone behind, he walked the New York streets in dark glasses and loitered in the open spaces where other anonymous people were idling—Central Park, Union Square, Battery Park. He strolled, sensing that he was being watched, possibly followed; the shutter click of someone ducking out of view whenever he turned. Maybe one of those demented art students.
Sitting on a bench one day in Central Park, near the zoo, he became aware that it was trembling beneath him—the slats, even a gentle rocking of the frame. At the far end of the bench a young woman sat with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving. She might have been crooning a lullaby softly to herself, but she was sobbing.
At first Minor Watt turned away and prepared to go. What made him linger was the suspicion that the woman would think, in his abrupt departure, he was rejecting her—and that might make her feel even worse.
Seemingly grief-stricken, she turned her smeared face to him and said, “I’m so sorry.”
Now it was too late for him to leave. Nodding at her with a look of consolation, he saw that she was beautiful. Her misery made her fragile and pretty, her sorrow creasing her features with complexity.
“You’re Mr. Watt,” she said.
He was not surprised. He
felt that the world knew him, even in his dark glasses and his oblique outings.
Looking closer, he recognized her as the woman from the gallery—Faris’s assistant, where he’d bought the Hopper he’d destroyed. The language of things.
What he’d first noticed about her—her Asiatic pallor, the porcelain smoothness of her skin—was more emphatic, probably because of her weeping. She had the ageless look of someone who’d been kept in a darkened room her whole life: the luminous delicacy of her face, her small shoulders, her slender hands. In contrast was the fullness of her breasts, which seemed to have a personality of their own—when she leaned they seemed to swing for him. Why had he not noticed her beauty before?
“I know you,” he said.
“Mara,” she said.
“How about a cup of coffee?”
At the nearby outdoor café, she told him she was being evicted for not paying her rent. And the reason she had no money was that Faris had laid her off after Minor Watt had stopped buying pictures. “No one’s buying art these days.”
In this period, Minor Watt felt responsible for much that was happening in the world of business, and in the city generally. He sensed that had influenced great shifts of money, not just in the art market but all over, because art was linked to so many areas of the economy. His destruction had made art an even more valuable commodity.
“I used to destroy my artwork,” he said. “You know I’m famous for that. I sometimes think that it was my wish to be an ascetic.”
“No,” Mara said, and got his attention—no one ever disagreed with him. She went on, “Ascetics are driven by pride, the desire to be like gods. You are different from anyone else.”
