The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “Yes you will,” my father said.

  “No I won’t,” I said, and I was not. I went to the cotillion with Jason Sample, and I loved it. But Daddy came to Conway the next day and told me he was taking me out of school. And he did.

  In the months and months following, Jason Sample wrote to me several times and asked if he could come to Little Rock to see me. I attempted to discourage him and told him it was unlikely that we could continue to see each other. He wanted reasons, he demanded explanations, and all I could do, eventually, was ignore him. Alone in my turret studio I was learning more about art than I had in Miss Dearasaugh’s classes, and I did not miss Conway at all; it was such a provincial village compared with Little Rock.

  By accident, in conversation, Daddy’s boss Henry Worthen learned that I was interested in art, and he arranged for me to meet his “daubing cousin” Spotiswode Worthen, who was a legendary Little Rock eccentric, a strange old man in his seventies and virtually a recluse. Apparently, Henry Worthen was in charge of Spotiswode’s financial affairs, and he thought it would be “useful” if his “unemployed” cousin agreed to give “lessons” to the daughter of his vice-president. Spotiswode Worthen had not given lessons during the previous twenty years, nor had he made any sort of social contact, and I remember how terribly rusty his voice sounded at our first meeting. He wasn’t an unkind man, and he knew much about the entire history of Western painting up to but not including the time of the Impressionists, who, he felt, were demoralizing the visual culture of civilization. Do you know the Impressionists, Latha? No? Well, they had revolutionized the art of that time, but Spotiswode Worthen had no use for them. The last great painter, he believed, had been Fantin-Latour—a mediocre academic hack—but Bouguereau—a somewhat more talented hack—remained “promising,” although he was in the last year of his life (Bouguereau, not Worthen, who would live two more years).

  Spotiswode Worthen was the first “real” artist that I had ever known, although the few paintings of his that I was permitted to see did not impress me, except with their technical facility. His style was…oh, what can I call it if you don’t know art? His style was constipated. It was hard and dark and fecal. Yet it was smooth and slick. But I tell you, “Spot” Worthen could paint! More than paint, he could draw. His paintings were actually just colored drawings, the colors reserved and drab. In his first lesson he made me sit for three hours drawing, with nothing but a lead pencil, a single egg. In the second lesson he moved the egg from the tabletop to the windowsill, into the direct sunlight, and made me spend three more hours with it. Sometimes I thought that I must be cackling or clucking in my sleep.

  Well, I spent two years, three times a week, receiving assignments and criticisms from Spot Worthen. I never asked my father, or Henry Worthen, what tuition was being paid to the man, who always dressed and smelled as if he were penniless. On my own I did bright watercolors of the Little Rock parks and the Little Rock townscape and the view of the river from Spotiswode Worthen’s studio, but my teacher did not appreciate these; he was scornful of “views.” His studio and living quarters were in an antebellum warehouse fronting the Arkansas River, down on Markham Street, half an hour’s walk from my house. The north windows had a fine vista of the muddy river and the picturesque village of Argenta on the opposite shore, but it never was a subject for him. The human figure, he told me, contained heavenly horizons more sublime than any landscape. He parked me in front of endless plaster casts of torsos and elbows, noses and knees, ankles and navels.

  Once I asked my sister Cyrilla to pose for me without her clothing, and she was willing, but her figure was so scrawny and limp that the result, when I showed it to my teacher, curled his lip in scorn. “Use a mirror,” he suggested, and I followed his suggestion, in warm weather, spending many long hours at a dresser, studying and drawing the full front view of my own naked body. When I showed the drawings to Spot Worthen, I was surprised (and maybe a little pleased) to see that his aged, wan cheeks actually blushed.

  “Good,” he said. “Certainly good. Continue. But notice…” and he pointed out the various muscles I had missed or slighted.

  He did not give me art history lessons as such, that is, no instruction in appreciation of the great artists of the past, but occasionally he talked about theory, and about the great masters (B.F.L., I came to call them: “before Fantin-Latour”). “Do you know why all of the great painters have been men?” he asked me once, and without giving me a chance to point out that Artemisia Gentileschi, Marietta Tintoretto, and Judith Leyster, to name only three, were female, he said, “Because only the male has a body which is charged with divine afflatus.” Modesty prevented a sarcastic comment I could have made on that, and I kept silent as he went on to explain how the female body is a lovely and graceful subject, analogous to soft, slow music, but only the male body was truly heroic, capable of grand mordents and cadenzas. The great Michelangelo had a good reason for making even his nude females look masculine.

  One day toward the end of my second year of study with Spotiswode Worthen, he impetuously swept his hand against the plaster cast I was drawing, knocking it to the floor, broken, and yelled, “Tate!” and summoned the black youth who sometimes came to the warehouse to clean it. He was a young man, perhaps not as old as I (I was twenty), tall, not dark-black but light-brown, and frightened, or clearly uneasy, in my presence. Here in the Ozarks, where there are virtually no Negroes, you would never understand how delicate the relationship between black men and white women must be. He took off his hat and held it in his hand as he bowed his head to Spot Worthen and waited for orders.

  “Do you have a dollar on you?” Spot Worthen asked me.

  “I think I may have a dollar,” I declared.

  “Give it to him, and he’ll pose for you.”

  “I’m not certain I want him to pose for me,” I said.

  “Because he’s a nigger? They make good models. Velázquez, Copley, Géricault, they all used niggers. Your Edmonia Lewis did a lot of niggers, although she made ’em look like burr-headed whites, but what can you do in white marble? Give him the dollar.”

  The epithet did not make me flinch; in Little Rock in those days everybody called them niggers; I myself had sometimes referred to Samuel as “our nigger.” But except for Samuel, a loyal old family servant, I had never been in a room with a black man before, certainly not one, as this one was now doing, at Worthen’s command, removing his clothing. Before Tate removed his trousers, however, Worthen whispered something into his ear and handed him a rag, a long strip of bedsheeting, and pointed toward the part of the studio that was Worthen’s living quarters. Tate went in there and returned a minute later wearing nothing but the strip of cloth wrapped clumsily around his hips. Worthen made adjustments to it so that as much as possible of the pelvis was revealed without sacrifice of decency, then he commanded me, “Draw.”

  I drew. For a dollar the black youth posed for three hours, never seeming to tire. He was extremely muscular, and his taut skin glistened with sweat. I did a front view, a side view, a back view, and an “action” pose of him holding a broom overhead as if it were a sword. The next time I came to Worthen’s I did details of the muscles of the latissimus dorsi, the rectus abdominis, the gluteus maximus. I devoted a whole afternoon, once, to his hands, getting the ligamentum carpi volare just right. I drew him asleep, or pretending to be. I drew him stretching and bending and twisting and throwing. I drew him, or tried to catch him, falling and leaping and running and jumping and kicking. I spent almost forty dollars on the Negro, and once when, accidentally, the loincloth slipped down without his notice or Worthen’s (the old artist had taken to sleeping through these sessions), I drew also what it had concealed, fascinated with the structure, although my face was so hot my eyes watered until I could hardly see.

  That one drawing was my undoing. I kept it in my portfolio in my studio at home, along with the hundreds of other sketches of the Negro. Occasionally my father climbed up to my studio, and h
e was the only other person permitted there. Once when he came up for a visit, I had a group of the drawings spread out on the floor and was reviewing them.

  “Jesus Christ, Viridis, who is this nigger?” he asked.

  “His name is Tate Coleman, and he is Spotiswode Worthen’s janitor and occasional model.”

  “Model? You mean he stands around like this with his clothes off?”

  “When he’s asked to.”

  “With you watching him?”

  “That’s how I did these drawings, Daddy.”

  “You drew these pictures?” He began to pick them up, one by one, and then to drop them, as if they were contaminated. He took my portfolio and opened it and exclaimed, “How many times did you do it?” I had momentarily forgotten about the one improper drawing, or I would have sought to stop my father’s ransacking of my portfolio. By the time I remembered, it was too late. He held the offending sketch at arm’s length and emitted a long whistle with his pursed lips. Then he said, not to me but to himself, “Yep, they’re long, all right.” Then he asked me, “Did you have to rub it to get it to be that long?”

  “Daddy!” I said.

  He ripped the drawing in two. Then he ripped it in four. Then eight, and into tiny fragments. He threw his handfuls of torn paper into the air and they drifted down like snowflakes. “Why don’t you give up this art foolishness and take up a nice hobby? Have you ever thought of riding? Would you like to have a horse?” I shook my head. “I’m getting you a gelding,” he said, and he walked out.

  To preserve all of the art I had completed up until that point—several portfolios and a number of canvases—I hid it in the attic. My father removed all the rest of the contents of my studio, locked it, and bought for a high price a chestnut Arabian gelding, which I named Géricault after a famous artist who painted horses, although the groom, servants, and everyone else called him Jericho. Spotiswode Worthen had to go to a hospital. I sneaked away from my riding lesson to visit him there. The old artist was very ill and could scarcely talk. I said I was sorry I’d had to discontinue my lessons with him. I had learned a lot, I said. I was very grateful. It had been a meaningful experience for me. Nothing that I had ever drawn had been as interesting as the body of Tate Coleman.

  “That body,” Spotiswode Worthen managed slowly to speak, “was found, with a large rock tied to the neck, in the river, downstream a ways.”

  I tried to lose myself in my riding: with all the fervor I had devoted to painting and drawing, I studied and practiced manège, a fancy word for fancy horsemanship. At a time when most women still rode sidesaddle in their long dresses, I raised eyebrows with my jodhpurs and English jumping saddle. I took Géricault for long rides in Pulaski Heights, west of Little Rock; I rode out as far as Pinnacle Mountain, and I rode back so fast and furious that passersby thought I was being pursued. Sometimes mounted policemen did pursue me, to see if I needed assistance or to find out why a woman was wearing pants in the city limits of Little Rock, but they never could catch me or stop me. I jumped ever-higher fences and walls and fallen tree trunks, anything that got in my way. It is a wonder I didn’t break my neck. I took lessons in how to fall, and I had several falls, and more than once I was cut and bruised but never broke anything…except, eventually, one of Géricault’s legs, broken so badly that he had to be shot.

  The day after Géricault was shot, in August of 1908, I packed a trunk and took a train for Chicago. I had been gone for several days before my mother or sister or the one brother still at home, Henry, noticed that I was missing, and Cyrilla wrote to tell me how they expressed astonishment that Daddy had not only permitted me to leave but had wired a Chicago bank with funds sufficient to keep me there for a year. Was he mellowing in his middle age? Did he feel guilty for depriving me of my art? He wasn’t simply letting me leave the nest, was he? How would they all do without me? How would Daddy do without me? He was saying he hoped that Cyrilla could learn to take my place, and nobody knew then, yet, just exactly what he meant, but Cyrilla knew, and she asked me in the letter if it was true that she was going to be expected to substitute for me in that regard as well. I told her I would not let him do that to her.

  Two bronze lions flanked the entrance to the Chicago Art Institute, a huge new building in the popular Italian Renaissance style. I felt when I passed between the lions the same way the ancient Hittites and the Mycenaeans felt at their lion gates—that I was acquiring the animals’ strength and energy, that I could do anything I wanted, that nothing was going to stop me. Thus I was prepared for the shock of the pictures I saw inside the museum. Remember, now, I had never seen art in the original before, except for a few paintings of his own that Spotiswode had shown me. There were no museums in Arkansas. The poor reproductions in black-and-white in the cheap art books I owned or could borrow had not prepared me for encountering the originals. Now I saw why Spotiswode had abhorred the Impressionists: they violated all the rules he had drilled into me. And the modern artists, more recent than the Impressionists, were even more extravagant. I stood a long time before an enormous tapestry-like park scene done all in tiny dots by an artist named Georges Seurat. But even his color was mild compared with that of another Frenchman by the name of Paul Gauguin, who, I was sad to discover, had died five years before. If only I could have studied with him instead of with Spotiswode! I spent a very long time standing in front of the paintings by Gauguin.

  Finally I tore myself away from the museum and visited the classrooms and studios. The fall semester had not begun, but the rooms were ready, row upon row of easels like a factory of some sort, and the walls held examples of student work from the previous year. I examined these, finding the drawings and paintings staid and stodgy and amateurish compared with the art I had just seen in the museum. I noticed that each painting or drawing had a date and a circled number: 1, or 2, or 3, and I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that these numbers were the monthly ranking of each student’s work, following the French academic teaching system. Would I ever achieve a No. 1 or even a No. 2? On a bulletin board I found a list of the names and numerical ranking of the student body. Nine hundred and thirty-seven aspiring artists! I noted the name of No. 937, Marybelle Curtis, and reflected that the poor girl must feel terrible. What if I myself became No. 938? No, I was too good, I was too confident, but I did not like the thought of all that competition.

  Chicago was such a huge place. I had prepared myself to find it a hundred times bigger than Little Rock, but I had not known it would be so dense, and so dark, and so vertical, and so flat, and so windy, and so crowded, and so smoky, and so dark, and so noisy. I had trouble understanding the way people talked, and they seemed totally unable to understand what I was saying and asking. After a particularly exasperating attempt at communicating with a streetcar conductor, I said aloud, “I might as well be in France!”

  That casual remark stunned me into long and serious reflection.

  Those bold artists whose work was hanging at the Institute, Seurat and Gauguin, had been French. Spotiswode Worthen had told me that all of the great painters of the last hundred years had been French, without exception (only before Fantin-Latour, of course). I had read an article in one of Spotiswode’s art magazines about an American woman with a French name, Miss Mary Cassatt, who was living in Paris, in her sixties, after having studied for years with the Impressionists, especially the one who could draw best, a man named Edgar Degas, now blind and in his seventies. Miss Cassatt was, like me, the daughter of a wealthy American banker. Would she be sympathetic to my story and situation if I could meet her and talk with her? Might she introduce me to Monsieur Degas?

  I never enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. I would never meet Mary Cassatt, let alone Edgar Degas, but I did put my trunk back on the train, after withdrawing all of the money my father had sent to the Chicago bank. I sent my father a telegram, which read: CHANGED MIND STOP GOING TO PARIS STOP YES GO AHEAD STOP YOU MAY HAVE CYRILLA STOP LOVE VIRIDIS.

  The terrible guilt
I should have felt for saying that was obliterated by the excitement of what I was about to do.

  In New York I discovered that I would need a passport and would have to wait a few days for it, and I used the opportunity to visit the museums there, where I saw more and more of those Impressionists and the moderns. Some of the paintings had labels reading: ACQUIRED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF MISS MARY CASSATT, and I had a constant fantasy of what the generosity of Miss Mary Cassatt was going to do for my life.