As we munched and sipped, Jason went over the various leads we hadn’t yet explored: find the cult deprogrammers and hear their stories; find Penny Dawson in the Keys and hear hers; same with Elizabeth Schechtner in Albuquerque; see if the Cobb family attorney, Nathan Silver, is still around and try to interview him if he is; try to find art teachers who’d worked with Courtney and Penny, and see if they remembered them.
‘I notice you’ve left out the Cobb brothers,’ I said.
‘I think we should approach them last. The more we know, the better our chances of being able to persuade them to tell us where Courtney is.’
‘Or what happened to her.’
‘Right, Tally. Because she seems to have fallen off the earth.’
Hannah sighed. ‘I’m wondering … we keep talking about this as if the murals are totally Courtney’s vision, that Penny was just her assistant. What if they worked it out together? Or if Penny played the bigger role. She didn’t reveal much when you spoke to her, Joan. By not calling you back, she made it clear she didn’t want to talk about the murals. I think we’ll be missing a bet if we don’t make a big effort to find her.’
Jason agreed. ‘I keep asking myself what it is that we really want to know. Not just whether Courtney is still alive, and, if so, where we can find her. It’s what the murals mean. For me that’s the real mystery – what’s the story? What’s the message?’
We divided up the leads. Joan volunteered to try to find Nathan Silver. I volunteered to try to find the art teachers. Hannah was eager to go out to Albuquerque to see Elizabeth Schechtner, but thought it was probably too soon.
‘I’ll look for the deprogrammers,’ Jason said. ‘Even though the company’s defunct, there ought to be a way to get their names.’
I’d been booked to cover a wedding that afternoon. Although that wasn’t the kind of photography that interested me, I worked hard at it to build my reputation. Fine art photography’s a tough game. Few can make a living at it. Jason encouraged me to do wedding work. ‘Better to have a day job where you get to use your camera than flip burgers or take a night watchman’s gig. Take it seriously,’ he advised me. ‘Commit yourself. Figure out ways to make the best wedding pictures anyone ever took. Give your clients more than they expect. Do that and word’ll get around that Tally Vaughan delivers. Then you’ll be able to pick and choose your gigs, and, when the time’s right, devote yourself to personal work.’
He told me that when he started out, he never intended to go into conflict photography. ‘I wanted to roam the world, shoot on city streets like Robert Frank did in The Americans. I didn’t want to seek out the grotesque like Arbus, make cruel portraits like Avedon, or impeccable platinum-printed shots of cigarette butts like Irving Penn. My role models were Frank, Cartier-Bresson and William Klein. But I found I didn’t get enough of a rush from street photography. Fighting, war – that was something else. They fulfilled my need. I wanted adventure, to go where it’s tough, go in close, take big risks in the hope of emerging with big rewards. I wanted to be like Capa, Rosenthal, take definitive images like Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, make important social statements like Salgado and Don McCullin.’
He’d been very good at it, and then he got sick of it. His thing was always to engage with people – soldiers, victims, refugees. And the way he did that was to always go for their eyes. He turned his obsession with eyes into a personal style. This came up when I asked him what had gotten him hooked on the murals.
‘I think it was the eyes,’ he said. ‘They spoke to me. I felt that they were engaged by someone else’s pain. Not just cruelty, but also curiosity. Like “How much can this person take, how much further can we push her?”’
Anna von Arx
I’d been less than candid with Hannah at our lunch. We’d been friends since our days at Ashley-Burnett, so I was open with her about my troubled relationship with Anders. I told her about the anonymous letter, and Anders’s insistence that I resign my job at the museum. But I left out the part that was most troubling – how Anders, when asked by the CMA board chairman if we were involved in an affair, didn’t merely laugh the question off. He looked the man straight in the eyes and lied to his face.
He was an excellent liar. He had a sincere manner that caused people to believe whatever he said, which most of the time was his best guess as to what he felt they wanted to hear. I’d caught him in a number of lies, the biggest of which was that he was eager to leave his wife and kids, and, after a decent interval, marry me. This was part of a plan he laid out – that we would both leave Calista, which he claimed he despised, move out to California and take up museum jobs there as a couple.
‘Who wouldn’t want to hire us?’ he said. ‘Two scholars, one a former director of a major museum and the other – you, my dear – an expert in art brut. We’d be irresistible.’
Yeah … right.
This was a problem I’d have to solve for myself. I thought I came up with a pretty good solution: break up with Anders, resign from CMA, move to New York and set up as an independent dealer in outsider art. I knew the field, had prospective clients and didn’t doubt I could find more.
There was one other thing I didn’t share with Hannah. I think it was partly because I wasn’t sure, and also worried that I’d find myself in the middle of some sort of stink and end up antagonizing powerful people who’d lose confidence in me and possibly become enemies.
Hannah was cautious, too. She made it clear that she wasn’t going to tell me where those murals were located, or anything more than that Jason had stumbled upon them on one of his nocturnal expeditions into the city’s lower depths.
Thing is, I thought I recognized several of the faces. Again, I wasn’t sure, so as soon as I got back to the museum, I went into the boardroom to check. There they were, in a joint portrait on the boardroom wall, two of the museum’s most generous benefactors: Alfred and Florence Cobb.
No doubt in my mind that whoever painted those murals had caricatured them. So what were the faces of two of Calista’s most important philanthropists doing wearing menacing expressions in a group of similarly menacing people on the painted walls of a cupola atop a boarded-up house?
Alfred and Florence had died in the late 1960s in a freak airplane accident. Their private plane, transporting them to their winter home in Palm Beach, went down in the Appalachians, a crash attributed to pilot error. Their only child, Horace Cobb, inherited Cobb Industries, and he and his wife, Elena, took his parents’ places on the CMA board where they served for many years. According to rumor, their daughter, Courtney, who’d followed Hannah and me at Ashley-Burnett, had been abducted and initiated into a cult, although later it turned out she’d run away from home, and the so-called cult was actually a responsibly managed halfway house for runaway teens.
But there was something else I knew about Courtney Cobb: that she was one of the most talented artists ever to attend Ashley-Burnett. I knew this from Miss Edith Lardner, who taught art at AB. One alumni day she took me aside. ‘You were my best student your year,’ she told me. ‘I want to show you something special.’
What she showed me were several of Courtney’s drawings from her eleventh-grade art class – works I recognized as astonishingly good.
So, was the artist who created the mysterious murals which Hannah wanted me to evaluate the same Courtney Cobb whose work I’d been shown by my old high-school art teacher? The fact that those murals contained recognizable portraits of Courtney’s grandparents seemed to clinch the case.
I could have told all this to Hannah, but by doing so I might later be exposed as abetting an investigation that Hannah made clear she and Jason were keen to undertake. The downside was that the current CMA chairman was Courtney’s older brother, Jack Cobb – the very man to whom Anders had lied about our affair.
The Cobb family was prominent in Calista. Its members had served on the CMA board for three generations. They’d donated millions of dollars’ worth of art to the museum, and Jack had prom
ised to leave it more works from his collection. Moreover, Jack’s wife, Mary, was one of the people I’d been encouraging to purchase and donate works of outsider art to the museum. If I went into business as a private dealer, she’d be a prime client prospect.
So … after my foray into the CMA boardroom, many possible conflicts of interest swirled around in my brain. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe those mural figures weren’t portraits of Alfred and Florence. Maybe Courtney hadn’t painted those murals. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I’d best keep my mouth shut and wait to see how things panned out.
I did, however, call Hannah that evening to mention that there was something in the back of my mind concerning the murals and that I’d get back to her if/when I figured out what it was. I did this as kind of a safety valve in case she confronted me later on. ‘Oh, yes,’ I’d tell her, ‘don’t you remember? I did tell you that something bothered me.’ In short, I covered my butt.
But then, a week or so later, something else flew into my brain: the ragdolls.
I wasn’t sure whether they really were connected to the murals, and I was almost afraid to try to find out. In the end, I couldn’t stop myself. When I looked into it, I concluded the connection was too strong to deny.
I became aware of those ragdolls the same time everyone did, when they first appeared on the market, offered at the booth of Galerie Susanne Weber at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. Weber was a small art brut specialist located in Lucerne, Switzerland, who was trying hard, so it seemed, to become a major player. The ragdolls she showed that year were so extraordinary that they were soon the talk of the fair – how wildly expressive yet superbly crafted they were, and the aura of mystery concerning their nameless creator, listed in the gallery brochure simply as ‘The Ragdoll Artist.’
When asked for details, Susanne would only say that this artist was a foreigner who’d lived for a long time in Switzerland and who’d been diagnosed as deeply schizophrenic. She would say no more, not even whether this person was young or old, male or female. She had three of the dolls for sale that year, each priced at forty thousand Euros – extremely high for a hitherto unknown artist. They were all sold within the first two hours – one to a prominent American collector, another to a Russian, and the third to a Japanese gentleman who promised to donate it to the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo.
How best to describe these sculptures so as to convey their totemic power? Perhaps ‘haunting,’ ‘mesmerizing’ and ‘darkly visionary’ would be a start. Also ‘obsessive,’ ‘gripping’ and ‘shamanic.’ Let me be clear: they have nothing to do with so-called voodoo dolls in function or appearance. Another way to describe them would be to say that they seem to represent ‘dark spirits,’ human in form in that they have heads, torsos and limbs, but also otherworldly and frightening in that they seem to radiate malice. And if dramatically lit, say from beneath, they resembled the kind of creatures that might appear in a terrifying nightmare.
From a technical point of view, much outsider art is fairly primitive. Sculptural pieces tend to be poorly constructed and must be carefully handled lest they fall apart. The ragdolls exhibited by Susanne Weber were not in this category. They were extremely well made. Each was about twenty inches tall, give or take, constructed of tatters of various plain white and off-white fabrics, with the features artfully demarcated with thick black or scarlet thread in the manner of caricatures. The heads of the Ragdoll Artist’s figures were somewhat larger than the bodies, and were stitched together as if sewn up by an untrained surgeon. The faces were scarred, their eyes were marbles or buttons, their lips were rendered in pink silk.
But it was the frontal positioning of these figures and their facial expressions that had the greatest effect on viewers. It was in these two respects that they reminded me of the mural figures Hannah showed me. The eyes of these dolls engage with yours, and they are all double-faced, with blank poker-face expressions on one side and unguarded expressions of derision, scorn, gloating, defiance and moral corruption on the other. Turn one around and you’re viewing another portrait of the figure in which the face is etched with marks that reveal his or her corroded soul. I saw similar double portraits in the murals. These pieces brought to mind Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
If, indeed, it turned out that the Ragdoll Artist and the painter of the murals were one and the same, then Courtney Cobb might well be the creator of both.
Working in the field of outsider art, you get a sense of creators obsessively working through personal issues. Their artwork seems sourced in their inner demons. Although some outsider art is quite joyous, much of it is very dark. The darkest element in the ragdolls does not appear in the murals, but is so prominent in the work of the Ragdoll Artist that many viewers are repelled. This is the bulging of genitals against the tightly trousered groins of the male figures, and the use of pink cloth and deep red thread outlining the groin area clothing of the females – erotic motifs that attracted much discussion when the dolls were first put up for sale. Thus my quandary: should I reveal this likely connection to Hannah and by so doing assist her and Jason on their quest, or should I keep quiet lest I disrupt my own life and possibly damage my hoped-for career as an independent dealer?
It was a month after our lunch that I resolved the matter. Hannah phoned me to say she’d heard I was resigning from CMA. I confirmed the rumor and added that I had something I wanted to show her before I left the museum. I arranged for her to visit me there the following Monday, the day the museum is normally closed.
I waited for her at the front desk, signed her in, then guided her first into the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings Gallery where there’s a terrific Camille Pissarro on the wall. The painting, a night view of Boulevard Montmartre in Paris, had been donated to CMA by Hannah’s grandfather, David Sachs.
‘I so used to love this one!’ she said. ‘Grandpa hung it in the living room just to the right of the fireplace. Pissarro painted the boulevard through the seasons from an upper-floor room at the Hôtel de Russie. I’ve been in the room. It’s in someone’s apartment now. The view from there is still amazing.’ She turned to me. ‘Thank you, Anna, for bringing me in to see it with no one else around.’ She paused. ‘But I don’t think this is why you invited me.’
I nodded. ‘We’re going up to the top floor.’
‘Sounds mysterious,’ she said.
From the elevator I guided her to the boardroom, unlocked it with my passkey and beckoned her in. The room, long and narrow, smelled of wood polish. The only furniture was a magnificent Regency dining table surrounded by fourteen period chairs. On the walls were commissioned portraits by local artists of major museum benefactors and board chairpersons.
‘Walk around, look at the portraits,’ I told her. ‘See if anyone looks familiar.’
I sat down in one of the board member chairs and watched as she slowly moved around the room, pausing in front of each painting.
She stopped in front of the double portrait of Alfred and Florence Cobb, gazed at it, squinted, then turned to me.
I nodded, then brought my finger to my lips. ‘Let’s go down to my office and discuss.’
She brought out her cellphone. ‘May I?’
I nodded.
She took a snapshot of the painting, then close-ups of the senior Cobbs’ faces.
‘Seen enough?’
She nodded. I locked the boardroom, then escorted her down to my office on the basement level. Once inside, I shut the door.
‘This what you meant when you told me something was nagging at you?’ she asked.
I told her I noticed the resemblance when she showed me the model at the restaurant and confirmed it when I got back to the museum. When I explained why I didn’t say anything then, she said she understood.
‘But now that you’re resigning …’
‘Yes. But I’d rather not be sourced on this,’ I told her. ‘Since I’m going into business, I can’t afford to burn my bridges here.’ She accepted this as well.
>
She gave me a quizzical look when I told her there was something else. I handed her several pictures of ragdolls from Galerie Susanne Weber catalogs. She studied them, fascinated.
‘Do you think …’
‘There’s a lot in common.’
‘But a different medium. In fact, my own.’
‘I thought these would intrigue you.’
‘Do you see the same hand?’
I told her that I did, but couldn’t be certain since there was not only a huge difference between life-size acrylic wall paintings and small textile sculptures, but also an interval of twenty-plus years. I told her that as most artists, such as herself, progress and forge a personal style, outsider creators tend to have a single set of obsessions which they proceed to work and rework throughout their lives. I told her that if the murals artist and the Ragdoll Artist turned out to be the same person, this would suggest some kind of devouring obsession – perhaps the result of an unresolved emotional trauma frozen deep inside.
‘A kind of mental illness is what you mean.’
‘That’s where a lot of great outsider art comes from. I sense a lot of power in these dolls, something raw beneath the superb craftsmanship. The only thing we really know about the Ragdoll Artist is that he or she is schizophrenic.’
We discussed possible ways of learning the Ragdoll Artist’s identity. I told her a number of people had already tried to discover it, and that an art journalist who did would achieve something of a scoop.
‘For a long time people tried to discover the identity of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante. Finally, someone did. It’s really a matter of detective work, a commitment by someone who is not going to stop until he solves the puzzle.’
Jason Poe
‘Basically, Anna’s saying we should hire a detective,’ Hannah told me. ‘Someone in Switzerland or here who we can send over.’
The Murals Page 10
