Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  Ramon raised his eyebrows. “You don’t read the signs?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Read the signs, man.” This time the wink seemed more in character. Just Ramon being Ramon, a handsome easy guy. Too passive maybe, but everybody’s friend. Mrs. Soames gave him a little tray for the glasses he was taking to the ladies downstairs.

  I watched a couple more men come into Piccone’s orbit, converse with him briefly then move off, as Walter had. Alone, he gave the impression of aloofness, but he seemed to make an effort to talk up each new person. When I went over I got a cooler reception. One of those head-to-toe, slow inspections that a man feels free to give another man under only two conditions: he’s willing to get down and fight, actually fight, the man being appraised; or else he’s sure enough of his higher status that a fight is out of the question. It’s already happened, so to speak. We weren’t wearing our walkie-talkies tonight, but of course there was no hiding the suit.

  “Who are you?”

  I told him.

  “Paul.” He put out a wide, warm hand. “John Piccone.” Close-up, he gave off a strong smell of cologne mixed with an earthy masculine odour. With the handshake came a fiercely frank stare, a big white smile. Italian charm. The face was florid, reddened with rib-eye and biscotti and cigars. The face of a man whose heart will burst one morning when he’s sixty, which was still a few years off, but will pump lustily every second until that moment. Short grizzled hair receding at the temples.

  “Try some of the veggies,” he said, surprisingly. With a nimble step back and an expansive sweep of his arm, as if we were in his living room, he indicated two platters of raw vegetables sitting on the low table behind him. Perhaps the other visitors had really just been searching for these trays, which Piccone seemed almost to be guarding. Curiously, there was no dip on either platter. I took a celery and carrot stick. Piccone took several of these in one hand, broccoli and cauliflower florets in the other, and began munching. I wondered if his heart doctor had already given him the heads-up and he had decided to pay it heed.

  “Must be nice,” he said. “Working in the gallery, I mean. Not so much for a young guy, maybe.”

  “You may be right about that.”

  “I love art,” Piccone said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I love it,” he said warmly, but nodding as if the thought made him sad.

  When I moved off after a bit more small talk, I had the curious sense, despite the alpha stare at the start, that I was deserting the man. Standing in his bankerish suit with his vegetable sticks and smile, the strongest impression he gave was of neediness. Like the kid at the edge of the dance or party, wanting to get in but not quite knowing how.

  Down in the lobby, I saw the sign Ramon had been alluding to. Opposite Josh MacMahon in his armchair, on the big Gallery Contributors lists, with their sliding flat silver bars so new names could be added or their places changed, G. Piccone and family now appeared. Not in the usual starting-place under Donors or Friends, but leap-frogged right up to Sponsors, just a few slots below the Carlssons. Only Benefactors occupied higher ground, but those were mostly corporate: the steel companies, Westinghouse, a couple of banks and the city; and Josh MacMahon, who had started the gallery and had left it his entire collection of pictures painted by himself and his more famous friends.

  I also saw Walter finesse another situation, the way he had finessed himself away from Piccone. Ninety minutes remained until the start of Robert’s shift downstairs. Eighty-nine minutes and some seconds in which he could still play. The notes banging and plinking and trilling off the long-empty lobby tiles – “acoustically perfect,” Robert had warned. Just around the corner, a few feet out in the main gallery, I saw Walter lean close to Barbara, who nodded and then went over to the piano and whispered something to Robert. He looked very grave, which meant he was very pleased, and clutching his briefcase, he rose and followed her into the gallery. It was Robert’s dream vision: Clement Greenberg (young and thin and still with hair) being led by Peggy Guggenheim (also much improved) to a private viewing of the surrealists in North America.

  In the short time they were gone, Ramon got the piano covered with its drop cloth and a tape player set up on the reception desk. He popped in a mixed tape from his DJ sample box, and within minutes the lounge party had moved down to the lobby, the lights dimmed, music happening, and attractive women moving their bodies, and then a few men joining them. People invented one-armed dancing styles, chugging wine with the other hand. A party had begun. Even Robert, trailing the fast-striding Barbara on their return, looked pleased at the action his exit had allowed. He began a flailing dance with Angela, his belt ends whirling dangerously.

  Electro-pop was in. Synth chords over peppery bass and drum machines, sweet melodies. And Michael Jackson. And Madonna. But Ramon mixed it up well, throwing in Bob Seger and the Stones to get people up on the floor, playing requests when he could find them. “Give the people what they want,” he’d shrugged once when I asked him about his DJ gigs, making it sound easy. Maybe it was. For the right temperament. Chairs were brought down from the lounge for dancers to rest in, and some people made a point of staying seated until their particular brand of music came on. Peter waited for his beloved OMD, then danced in a precise, slightly effeminate way, his feet close together and barely moving, his torso making sinuous shivers. By himself at first, then with Lars and Leo and their mother, who copied his movements. Neale, looking sour again, was sitting with his cowboy boots stretched out in front of him, a long statement of non-dancing as well as a tripping hazard.

  Angela rolled her eyes my way at Robert’s “jitterbugging”, but she was having fun. Her cheeks flushed, laughing when he cranked her around in a spastic spin. But next up she got Jason, who shuffled awkwardly to “Start Me Up”, the usual masculine jerks and jolts, like a man forced to be sprightly in body armour. Our registrar was an earnest, thoroughly decent guy, a fitness buff capable of telling you far more than you wanted to know about lactic acid and proteins. Executing a neat turn away from him, Angela shot me a pained look of appeal. I spoke to Ramon, and rescued her when the next song started. “Avalon” by Roxy Music, one of her current favourites. We danced in a slow tight circle, her body humid and warm. It felt like high school. Almost that magical again.

  At some point I went back to relieve Sean, though he still hadn’t asked to be. I made a slow clockwise tour through the galleries to reach him. They never looked better than on an opening night. The permanent collection was sprinkled with international works – thin on the big-name Europeans, true: a Picasso drawing, one of Matisse’s late scissor cuts; though better on the American Abstract Expressionists – but Walter had us cranked up full-throttle Canadian tonight. Which also meant, truthfully, our best works. Boisterous recent art filled the high-ceilinged MacMahon Gallery. Names I’d come to know without trying to: Wiitasalo, Craven, Martin; the Bolduc and Ron Martin; Otto Rogers and Charles Gagnon and Yves Gaucher; the Jacks (Bush and Shadbolt and Chambers) and the Pratts (Mary and Christopher); Gershon Iskovitz and Graham Coughtry and Ron Bloore; a Michael Snow; the big Barbara Astman photo-tryptich. One of Paterson Ewen’s gouged and trowelled planetoid pieces, spiny trailing textures in plywood and plaster – as mesmerizing to gaze into as it was heavy to lift. That was just what I could see on a straight walk through the middle, ignoring the bays and panels.

  The little Lamont Gallery seemed to nudge the tour back a bit in time, and to up the representational quotient as well. There were abstracts by Borduas and Riopelle, but alongside these – Walter was a bold juxtaposer – hung one of Colville’s scenes of suicidal stasis. Warmer interiors by Goodridge Roberts and John Lyman. And two luscious nudes, one by Edwin Holgate and one by Bertram Brooker. The subjects were big-bodied women, so large and warm-skinned I barely thought of them as paintings.

  Leaving those, and taking a left into the smaller of the Teale Galleries was a bit of a jolt. In the little room, with the low ceiling and slatted wooden floor, Walter ha
d hung the gallery’s oldest Canadian paintings. They were mostly small dark oils, showing old men in frock coats and old women in bonnets, along with a few heart-faced brides. A few watercolours, cruder but brighter, of streams and waterfalls. Several drawings and paintings of old towns, one of them on fire. An embarrassing, though popular, scene of Indians dancing, the gestures frenzied, the faces caricatured. Probably the most interesting, at least to a local, was Robert Whale’s “View of the City”. Showing a scattering of small houses between clumps of forest by the side of a fresh blue lake I’d never seen. I couldn’t even be sure what vantage point the picture had been painted from – everything in Hamilton had changed that much in one hundred and thirty years.

  Walter used the main Teale Gallery, just before the surrealist show, for the jewels of the gallery’s permanent collection. All of the abstract pieces had their fans, but these more familiar pictures drew most of the patrons we got, and perhaps most of the money as well. Our Group of Sevens. Our Krieghoffs. Our Kurelek series. Our Paul Peel (a pretty dicey, very popular, back view of a pubescent girl after her bath). Our Paul Kane and William Brymner. Morrice and Cullen and Carr and Milne and Schaeffer. Overlapping the eras and styles of the ones in the other rooms, but by public appraisal the gallery’s best. Probably the picture that people stopped at most often, and longest, was George Reid’s “Illicit Hour”, with the boy and girl sitting tantalizingly near each other in the hayloft. Like most things, painting worked better when you worked sex, sexual energy, into it. A thought which put me in the ideal mood to enter the surrealist show.

  Mumbles wasn’t mumbling, for once; just reading. Rounding the entrance panel – SECRETS OF THE SURREALISTS worth the hippy’s time and the gallery’s money – I found Sean studying a quote silk-screened on the other side. “He is as handsome . . . as the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” from Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont.

  Sean, who had been staring at this with concentration, sniffed when he saw me. “Surrealism 101. I could have found them a better quote.” Turning his back on it, he tugged the walkie-talkie from his belt. “I’ve been calling into this. Surely at least Hans is wearing one?”

  “The music’s pretty loud.”

  “Christ, yes. Le sacré d’everything followed by Killer.”

  “Thriller?”

  “Hardly. That ought to be enough surrealism for anyone. Anyway, it’s given me a Code 2.” He handed me the walkie-talkie and stalked off. Sometimes I wondered, as with Ramon – though to precisely opposite effect – how much of it Sean was putting on.

  When he’d gone, I looked around me. One thing I did appreciate about the job was the leisure it gave me to absorb art gradually, in glances. No two-hour culture cram: I could look at what I liked when I liked, knowing there’d be plenty of other chances.

  The small introductory room I was in had black and white photographs of some of the leading surrealist artists on the walls. Dali’s waxed and curled moustaches and bulging eyes leapt out from other, milder faces. More like businessmen, most of them, to see them posed in their suits. Quotations on laminated white boards hung between the photographs. And more quotations – among them the one Neale had led off with – under the title “Literary Forbears and Confrères”. That sounded like Neale.

  My eye caught on some colour and I crossed the room. Mounted on another white board was a reproduction – a simple colour photocopy it looked like – of a fantasy head of a man composed of fruits and vegetables. “Summer”, I read from the label Jason had prepared. “Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1537-93), a forerunner of the Surrealists”. The Italian name and the vegetables – and maybe even something in the bulbous, large-nosed face – made me think of Piccone. But I wondered about the display itself. Hanging a photocopy, even a good one, seemed kind of cheesy. Not like Neale, really. Again I wondered: What comment was he trying to make about the show or the gallery? Or about himself, even?

  In the inner Braithwaite Gallery, it was Dali again that jumped out at me. “Auto-eroticism of the Didact Amid Hypertrophic Forms” showed a voluptuous girl staked out in one of Dali’s deserts, her wrists and ankles bound by rubbery tendrils. The hypertrophic forms were shiny and tubular and globular, like engorged metallic penises and breasts and buttocks, hanging above her in sections, poised. In the distance, small spiky machines, or mechanistic spined animals, advanced in a column towards her. It looked like soft porn with a hard twist of whimsy. Vargas on peyote, say. I liked it as such, without seeing much more in it. 1957, said the label.

  Back out at the entrance to the show, just inside the MacMahon Gallery, I wondered about that date. 1957. I’d heard someone – Walter probably – describe surrealism as a movement that flourished between the wars. Shouldn’t that have put the Dali painting twenty years beyond the pale? And thinking about that, I remembered a short conversation I’d heard between Neale and Walter earlier in the day.

  One of the advantages to being a “statue” was that people often talked in front of you as if you weren’t there. You heard things. Like this little exchange between the director and the curator. Which, like most of their exchanges, seemed to center on a kind of barbed in-joke. And on some kind of subterranean agreement and disagreement, both at the same time.

  “Paintings done by some surrealists,” Neale had said.

  And Walter had replied, a bit tartly, “There’s only so much scholarship the local market will bear.”

  Put together with the Dali date, the meaning of the exchange, which had been murky at the time, came into sharper focus. It was about the title of the show: “Secrets of the Surrealists”. That implied they were key works. But maybe – by Neale’s comment – they weren’t at all. Maybe they were minor works done by artists who, at one time or another, not necessarily by virtue of the work in this show, had been labelled surrealists. It was a sly title that way. Secrets. Which ones? And I wondered who had come up with it.

  Budget constraints – cruel and inexplicable cutbacks by various Councils – meant that a lot of the gallery’s shows had to be organized around dubious principles. Art of Montreal. The Prairie Eye. When the only real principle operating was: This Is What We Could Get. Every show could have been titled that. In his bitterer moments, I’d heard Walter admit as much.

  On the far side of the title panel, under locked glass on a sculpture pedestal, was a chess set carved by Max Ernst. Detaching it from its present context, you saw some lumpy shapes with the occasional more refined curlicue or bulb. The start of a retirement project, say, or a week in occupational therapy; and one that would need a lot more carving, and maybe instruction, before players would be able to tell the pieces apart reliably. Availability. It accounted for a lot of what you saw in the art world. Maybe a lot of what you saw anywhere. The Chile Dogs’ playlist – which we called punk and then post-punk – had consisted of short, thrashable tunes with good hooks and no guitar solos. Lots of Ramones. Certain Stones: “Paint It Black”. “Mother’s Little Helper” (minus the sitar part). “Clampdown”, The Clash. Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” (a crowd pleaser, maybe our best). The Sex Pistols. The Kinks. “Summertime Blues”. What we could find. What we could agree on. What we could play. We got called “fearlessly eclectic” in our one review. And prayed no one else would understand that as a synonym for “limited”.

  Sean’s Code 2 was protracted and perhaps difficult, because his lips were barely moving as he crossed the MacMahon Gallery toward me. We exchanged the walkie-talkie without a word and I returned to the lobby.

  There the Gala Preview had entered its final phase, musically and otherwise. Most of the guests had left, including Angela. But the ones that remained, a dozen or so, were dancing wildly to Big Band tunes. Which might have been brought by Piccone, since Artie Shaw was a little out of Ramon’s line, and the Italian had claimed a large space in the centre of the floor. He was dancing exuberantly with two of the society babes, squeezing each of them close aroun
d the waist while he kicked his legs out jerkily. The ladies looked a bit excited, a bit appalled. Excited to be appalled maybe, and vice versa. Hans was fox-trotting with an older volunteer. Most surprisingly, Barbara had her arms up and her hands locked behind Neale’s neck, swaying her hips to the languid beat, while Neale wiggled his a little more tightly, staring down into her hair. I went to where Ramon, who was dancing too, could see me and pointed down at the floor. He took a hand off his partner’s bare back and mimed puffing a joint. After an opening, Walter permitted the attendants to finish the opened wine bottles before clearing up, and Hans didn’t mind Ramon adding something from his stash, though Hans, who’d tried it after some coaxing one night, preferred to “stick to Cavendish.” But I was gallery’d out. I shook my head and Ramon gave me a thumbs-up.

  Robert was too busy manipulating the levers of the lobby cameras, considering the dancing women from various security angles, to detain me in the basement. Without bothering to be sure who I was, he buzzed me out when he heard me jiggle the door handle.

  4

  The earlier rain had passed leaving a tattered sky, big dark clouds scudding like galleons. Mild fuzzy vapours, cutworm smells. Within a month or two, the mild damp would intensify into the sticky burning haze that was our invariable summer. There’d be a couple of scorching days soon, warning of it. But this was the window, our short spring, when the temperature felt just right.

  I cut through the parking lot behind city hall and walked up Park Street, passing the apartment building where Robert lived with his sister. I’d never visited him there; we had a gallery acquaintance only. I’d never met Claudia either, though I knew from my meandering chess talks with Robert that she was in her mid-twenties, a few years older than him, and a painter. A bit of a mixed-up case, too, though Robert never put things that simply. He called her “a talent in exile . . . a refugee from the Toronto arts scene.” Robert being Robert, I couldn’t tell if that was any kind of real appraisal or a grab at reflected glory, borrowing a little self-inflation from a troubled sibling. Across the street, behind a black wrought-iron fence, was an old two-story limestone building surrounded by a spacious lawn with tall maples. It was an odd place to pass in the morning on my way to work, because the top floor had been rented out to an insurance company, while the ground level remained an elementary school. Or perhaps the insurance company had bought the building. “Saving the school” despite its shrinking enrollment had been another civic controversy briefly covered by the Witness. In any case, it was funny to see the mix in the morning just before nine, the children playing with ragged shouts, the businessmen stepping through them with their briefcases and takeout coffees.