Richard was ambitious, but until recently he had felt mismatched with the mainstream values of the art world. It was anomie, I told him—the experience of individual values mismatched with society’s as established by Émile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century. It was this precise experience that had led me to break from my own community, or so I believed, and what was driving me to the pursuit of my true self.
Richard had always been particularly inspired by classical painters such as Rembrandt and Hammershøi. But at the New York Academy of Art he was taught to admire modernists. After a period of frustration, he wrote a letter to the controversial Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, asking to study with him. To Richard’s surprise, Odd accepted him.
Eventually, Richard realized that there was a whole community of people who felt exactly the way he did, in the sense that their aesthetic ideals did not match up with what was accepted in society. It was called the Kitsch movement, and Odd was the father of it. Created in protest against postmodern art philosophy, Kitsch embodied an aesthetically humanist position in what it saw as an antihumanist technological society. Artists who were acutely sensitive to this experience were drawn to the Kitsch movement, finding a home among people who similarly identified as pariahs and outcasts in the modern art world. They tended to prefer the use of classical techniques to paint contemporary subjects as a way of expressing their unapologetic love of beauty and how they valued its role in artistic expression. As I looked at the various works produced by Richard and his peers, I recognized the experience of marginalization and alienation as strong themes.
I spent many afternoons poring over the art books in Richard’s studio. I became fascinated with Odd’s work, more so when I heard the stories about him that Richard shared. Many of Odd’s portraits were of himself as the alien. In real life, he was one, having been essentially exiled from his home country. He was dogged by accusations of tax fraud, although it was plain to the Kitsch community that this was a ploy. Anything to destroy Odd, Richard told me. Norwegians are conformists, he said, and Odd isn’t afraid to be political, and they just can’t stand that.
Later Richard would tell me that a mistake in the government accounting had been discovered, that the amount of money really involved had become too negligible to legally pursue in court to the full extent that Norway had planned. “So they’ll give up now,” I said. “Odd will be able to go back to Norway.”
“I don’t think they’ll ever really give up,” he said. “I think Norway will always be looking for a way to get him, and Odd is always going to have to deal with that. But at least now he can return to his house on the Norwegian coast. He can go home.”
When I tried to meet Odd in his house outside Paris, I had to go through Richard, who had to go through Odd’s son, Börk. Odd never stayed in one location for long; always moving among his various homes. “Is he paranoid? Or justly afraid?” I asked Richard.
“Who knows?”
Odd had found a way to deal with his feelings of alienation early on, by surrounding himself at all times with people who shared his experience. He became a teacher. Potential students from all over the world could apply to study with Odd, living in his home for months or years at a time in exchange for assistance with Odd’s work. In this way, his homes throughout Europe were havens for refugee artists, young men and women escaping from worlds in which they felt misunderstood and coming to a place where they felt accepted. Richard had been one of those students. He had finished up a degree at the New York Academy of Art, where he had felt like the poor boy on scholarship who would never amount to much. He had worked for artists in New York City whom he didn’t respect. He had nothing back home in Georgia, where he had always been considered strange. New York had very little room for an artist who did not follow the mainstream. It was a professor who had advised Richard to write to Odd.
In the end, Richard became Odd’s best and most renowned student. The work he produced under Odd’s tutelage went on to gain international attention and catapulted him into a world where collectors and art critics fawned over him, and galleries competed to display his work. It was a sharp contrast to the tepid reception Richard had experienced in his early days, when his ideas were dismissed because he lacked the credibility of education and parentage. I identified strongly with this reinvention, as I saw it. Both of us had experienced sudden and complete transformations in our lives.
In Norway and in Paris, Richard and Odd had slowly developed an intense master-student relationship, and Odd had then entrusted Richard with his estate in France for three years, during which time Richard had painted furiously. By the time I met him, he was avidly preparing for several exhibitions, all scheduled to take place within a three-month period.
Being prolific wasn’t enough for Richard, however. “I want to paint something great,” he said to me. “Not something that will sell, but something that will end up in a museum.” He often painted portraits for money, as he lived off his commissions. This required him to paint pretty things, as opposed to the more provocative work he felt drawn to do. “For once, I just want to paint something for myself, even if others feel it’s too disturbing.”
Then Richard asked me to pose for him.
“I want to paint a version of Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride,” he said to me. He told me I was probably the first real Jew he had ever encountered. He felt he could now have the kind of access to the character that would enable him to paint not just the visage but also the soul. “I’ve always had a fascination with that painting. I’ve been looking for an inspired way to present that idea, something new, but still embodying the spirit of the original work.”
I had never seen or heard of The Jewish Bride. It surprised me that Rembrandt would have painted Jews, and I mentioned this. Richard pulled up an image of the painting on his phone. The two people in it did not look especially Jewish to me.
“I think he wanted to show the humanness in oppressed people. See how they look careworn but they’re dressed in fine fabrics? And the colors—they’re very luscious. It’s an attempt to paint them as the bourgeoisie. So at first glance, the image is of prosperous newlyweds, but on second look, most viewers would notice the finer details, and they’d realize they’d been duped. There was a kind of outrage about it. That was what Rembrandt was aiming for.”
I looked at the image of a woman, not too young, with a sweet, submissive smile, looking up at a middle-aged, balding man who has his hand on her breasts, as if to denote fertility. It felt like an image of me, back when I was a submissive Jewish wife. I didn’t want to be painted like that.
“That’s not the kind of Jewish woman I am,” I said to Richard. “That was back in the day when all Jews lived in ghettos. When they only married each other, and married young. That was me when I was seventeen. But that’s not me now.”
Richard nodded. “Maybe that’s the answer to my problem—maybe that’s the way to make it new. A Jewish bride, but one like you—strong, independent, free.”
I was skeptical. I was also reluctant to pose. I had never thought of myself as a muse or a model. I was the writer, the observer. It was the world’s job to pose for me, in a sense.
But after a while, the idea started to appeal to me. My excruciating self-consciousness was becoming a real problem. In many ways, I had chosen the life of an observer because it made it easier to deal with that painfully self-aware feeling all the time. If I ever wanted to make my way back into the world without having a panic attack, I needed to learn how to get comfortable in my skin.
About a month later, I told Richard I would pose for him. He just had to come up with the idea first.
In the end, we came up with the idea together. I knew that if I could summon the bravery to do it, the painting would strip me of my last defenses and build a sense of self-acceptance in its place. For that reason, I steeled my gut one Sunday morning and dropped my pants.
It was the first t
ime that I had been looked at by anyone, let alone looked at in daylight.
“I’ve seen lots of vaginas before,” Richard said, as if to soothe me.
“Yes, I know, but you’ve never seen one menstruating.”
“That’s true.”
“Couldn’t you have gotten one of your many models to pose like that? They’re so used to being naked.”
“They never would have agreed to be seen that way. They want to be painted at their best, portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. Their modeling is vain; it’s an ego thing for them. None of them would have ever agreed to this.” Richard furiously mixed colors on a palette as he glanced between my legs.
There didn’t seem to be any difference to me between modeling naked and modeling naked while menstruating. I suppose nakedness, in all its forms, had always been made to seem offensive and shameful to me. I remember being told the story of Kimchit, the biblical woman who never allowed the beams of her own house to see her nakedness, that’s how modest she was. She was rewarded with seven sons in the high priesthood. This story would give me goose bumps in the shower. Was I offending God with my body? Was I horrifying the very ceiling beams above me? To this day, I get in the bath and feel a shiver, like I’m being watched.
Where I come from, rabbis believed that menstruation rendered women into unclean beings, who therefore had to be regulated in order to protect the male community from contamination. I had been made to feel dirty and ashamed for the same bodily cycles that were responsible for my most important contribution: life.
I was taking it back.
When Richard showed me the composition sketch, he asked me if I could come up with something that was symbolic of a Hasidic ritual that he could insert into the landscape, something that would speak to my story. But there was nothing ritualistic about my past that felt like a part of my identity now. All the traditions I had once engaged in felt sexist and oppressive to me.
No candles, no prayer shawl, I insisted. Instead, I asked for a blue heron to be in the painting. I had first developed a fascination with white egrets in Louisiana, sitting by the banks of the Mississippi to watch them scavenge their daily repast. I had never been to the South before, and the birds I had grown up around were city pigeons. My grandmother had displayed an unusual love for birds; she left food on the porch for them every morning. So occasionally I was able to see a cardinal, and rarely, a blue jay—if I ran fast enough in response to my grandmother’s urgent call to “come see!”
The egrets were like exotic birds to me. They made me feel as if I had traveled a long way. Perhaps they were the pigeons of the Mississippi, but they might as well have been swans. They were so white and so elegant. Their stick-limbed legs remained perfectly still as the gray water slopped around them, bits of the river’s surface shining white when it caught the sunlight. Every so often, they’d dip, so fast you could miss it if you blinked, and up they’d come with a gleaming silver fish in their beaks. One gulp, and that was gone, too, and it was back to watching and waiting.
I thought the egrets represented patience. They were very committed to the task of procuring food, but they were also willing to put in the necessary time and effort to do so. I reflected that I had not met many people who could match their life skills. Humans wanted instant gratification; egrets seemed to understand that the reward would be there at the end, if the work was done right. I liked that. I, too, wanted to wade into the Mississippi and wait for treasure to swim by.
Then, shortly after I moved up to the little dead-end street in New England, a bird I had never glimpsed before moved into the small pond at the entrance to our road, fed through a stream coming from the lake. All summer long, this blue heron stood at the edge, barely protruding from dense shrubbery, waiting patiently for his meals. As I walked or drove past every day, there he was, so still you might mistake him for part of the foliage, so beautiful it made me wonder what he was doing in this ordinary corner of the world when I had thought that there would never be anything beautiful to see again. It was only after I looked it up online that I realized blue herons and egrets were one species.
In my local coffee shop I met a man who carried The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and a handmade pot of ink to fill his quill with. He told me that the blue heron was a totem animal, speaking to self-sufficiency and multi-capability.
“I thought it was about being patient,” I said.
“That fits, too! It’s what it says to you that matters. Do you identify with the heron?”
One late summer day I had witnessed the heron ascending into flight. It had lifted itself awkwardly and fitfully into the air, seeming to struggle against something. When it finally leveled out, it climbed ever so slowly into the sky, its wings working with visible effort. But after achieving the necessary momentum, the bird relaxed into a graceful and deliberate stroke, flying the way I had expected it to fly. It looked free.
“I identify with the fact that getting up there is tough, and should look it,” I said.
I walked out of the coffee shop feeling heavy with the desire to get off the ground, just like a heron. It felt as if I had been beating my wings in vain for years.
The heron returned again this spring, to my little floating dock, where it paced all afternoon, catching perch and sunfish. It was a solitary creature, concerned with providing for itself, never once allowing for play. After gazing at it for a few hours, I suddenly realized I had been wrong. The heron was afraid. It was anxious. The egret stood in the Mississippi and fished all day because it was afraid it would run out of food, that the river would someday stop being a bounty of meals. It gorged on fish as if each one were its last. I felt sorry for the heron on my dock, maintaining such a vigilant watch all day. He could not simply have faith that his needs would be provided for.
When Richard showed me the final sketch of the painting, in which the heron’s leg was grasped in my outstretched hand, I saw it. Had it been a coincidence or a subconscious rendering of the split I felt in my own identity? The image was so clear that I couldn’t unsee it if I tried. The heron was the kaparah, the bird sacrificed by Hasidic Jews once a year before Yom Kippur. The ritual was designed to confer one’s sins on the bird; with the subsequent murder of the animal, the sins were erased, compensated for by the sacrifice.
Every year I had visited the kaparah vendor and grasped a chicken by its legs as I swung it over my head while reciting the prayer of guilt and repentance. When I had been pregnant with Isaac, I had swung three chickens over my head at once, one for my sins, and one female and one male chicken for the sins of my fetus. Sin was something taken for granted; the human being growing in my uterus was sinful just for existing.
Looking at the painting, I saw myself grasping the heron as if to lift myself up along with it. The image carried a dual interpretation of atonement for guilt and a struggle to break free. It was the most truthful depiction of myself that I had ever encountered. I would always be struggling between my past and my future, between my roots and my potential for self-fulfillment. But looking at myself, frozen in that struggle, didn’t seem like a terrible thing. It was beautiful. I was beautiful.
After the painting debuted at a gallery in New York City in early spring 2013, I helped Richard take it off its stretcher and roll it up in bubble wrap. We packed it into a cardboard cylinder, and with Richard this time, I again headed to Paris, where Odd was having one last vernissage in his house in Maisons-Laffitte. Odd would want to see the painting, offer his advice on how to improve it. Then it would be hung in Richard’s gallery in Paris.
Paris felt even more exciting this time around. I enjoyed the sunlight at an outdoor café on avenue Carnot, gazed at the Arc de Triomphe, looked forward to a weekend full of adventure. Then I descended into the cool tunnels of the RER station, where I boarded the commuter train that would take me to Maisons-Laffitte. Richard was already there, no doubt helping with the last-minute s
etup for the exhibition. I was wearing jeans and a blazer, and I felt pleasantly attractive, as if I’d have no problem fitting in with the crowd. I emerged into the downtown area of this famous horse-racing suburb, the place where Hemingway went to gamble in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. Here there were no sidewalks, only unpaved ground; horses hooves marked the depressions in the grass. Magpies pranced fearlessly in the green, and dandelions grew at the borders of gated estates.
Odd’s estate was on a beautiful street, from which one could see across the Seine to the hills on the other side. Only his self-portrait, overlaid on a ceramic tile, marked the address—there was no name on the bell. The gates swung open slowly for me, and I walked down a path bordered by lush trees, into a small clearing from which I could finally see the house, in typical grand chateau style, with shrubs and trees growing with wild abandon all around.
Inside, the house had been emptied of furniture. In each beautiful, high-ceilinged room, Odd’s work had been hung; a tour of the entire house yielded a veritable lifetime of achievements. Although Odd was in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition, some of his children, specifically two sons and two daughters, milled about providing guests with information or a glass of champagne. They were all in their teens, with glowing skin, Scandinavian bone structure, and ethereal blue eyes.
I walked from room to room, my high-heeled footsteps echoing on the stone floor. The work was mesmerizing; up close, its power to transform put all those books I’d read to shame.
Soon, the guests were asked to gather in the main room, where a renowned composer, Martin Romberg, had prepared a concert for the evening. A cellist and a pianist started to play, and as they reached the high notes, I could hear the return calls of chirping birds in the dusk. I was inexpressibly moved.
Exodus: A memoir Page 16
