The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  Once, when we were walking behind a tenement on the Lower East Side, Rockwell spotted an abandoned sawhorse in a heap of trash. He stopped in his tracks and shook his head sadly. “The poor darling,” he said. “A fate like this after selflessly committing his body to a lifetime of helping carpenters.”

  He was not joking; his eyes were filled with tears. “We must take him away from here,” he insisted. “We must take him to a better home.”

  After we dug the sawhorse out of the trash pile, Rockwell caressed it, wept over it, praised humanity in the light of it. While he expounded on its service record, its long, patient hours in the company of labour, he ran his fingers gently over the hundreds of saw marks on its battered surface. He was quite sober at that moment, but was determined that we should take the sawhorse with us on our tour of the bars, where he would use it as a point of departure for various lectures of a socialist nature. How vividly I remember the last glimpse that I caught of him that night. He was standing on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, singing “Solidarity Forever” and waving goodbye, with the sawhorse — now called Dobbin — tucked protectively under one arm.

  Much later I would paint the dark water with bright-blue lights reflecting on it, and I would use the same shade of ultramarine blue to illuminate the life buoys on the ferry and Rockwell’s kind face. I would paint the angular form of the sawhorse in lamp black, and, for the first time, I would put myself into the underpainting, almost a silhouette, shown from the rear.

  Oddly enough it was this dark figure, this witness to departure, that was the most difficult to transform, that bled through the subsequent layers of paint, and finally had to be scraped off with a knife.

  One afternoon, sometime during the previous winter of 1918, I had returned from class to find a note from Rockwell pinned on my door. “Be at Sloan’s Bar, 5 P.M.,” it read. “There’s someone from upstate I want you to meet.”

  I opened the door, tossed my portfolio inside, and clattered back down the narrow stairwell that led to the street. It was already after five. Rockwell’s energy made him a restless man with a tensile attention span. He might not still be there.

  But he was, and in the company of an older man, wonderfully dishevelled; a man who gave the impression that, although sitting reasonably still, he was nevertheless being buffeted by invisible forces. He was sweating profusely and kept mopping his wet brow with a large, stained pink handkerchief.

  “Austin,” said Rockwell, “meet Abbott Thayer. He hates this bar.”

  Rockwell had called the establishment Sloan’s Bar ever since the painter John Sloan had made a picture of the place. It was, in actuality, named McSorely’s Ale House, as was the work of art.

  “I do not hate this ale house,” said Thayer. “I hate no place on earth. But it is far too warm and there are no angels here.”

  I looked at Rockwell. He was listening attentively to what the older man had to say. “You hate Sloan’s painting,” he said to him.

  “The painter has depicted only that which is here, not what might be here, not what should be here. Why, why,” demanded Thayer, “why would he want to do that?”

  “He has painted the dignity of the common man, Abbott.” Rockwell motioned in the direction of one of the bartenders. “Look at him, Abbott. There he stands in his long white apron. He probably is an angel, and if not now, he will probably become an angel”

  “There are no animals here either,” said Thayer, ignoring altogether Rockwell’s fantasies about the bartender. “There aren’t even any concealed animals here”

  “Thayer here,” explained Rockwell, “has written a most scholarly volume entitled Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. Tell Austin about the blue jay, Abbott.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the blue jay,” said Thayer. He looked around the room suspiciously. “The enemy might be listening. One can never be too careful.” He rose to his feet, approached the potential angel, and ordered another glass of water.

  “Thayer is in town,” Rockwell told me, “because he is trying to encourage various and sundry worthies to take his theories to the War Department. He’s had a hell of an ongoing row with Teddy Roosevelt about birds, concealing colouration and all that.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt?” I choked on my beer. “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. They’ve been battling it out for over a year.” Thayer returned to the table and slumped dejectedly in his chair. “How many letters has Roosevelt written to you, about the blue jay?” Rockwell asked him.

  Thayer drew his chair closer to mine and whispered, “The blue jay is invisible in snow. He is coloured blue and white precisely so that he will blend with the snow. I have made a painting entitled Blue Jay in Snow in which the bird is entirely invisible, cant see him at all.” He loosened the dirty, faded cravat at his throat. “Mr. ? Roosevelt refuses to accept my incontestable proof of this, to the great peril of the war effort. What was the point of us entering this godforsaken war if concealing colouration is not used to our advantage?” He thumped his forehead with his handkerchief, attempting to capture various beads of sweat.

  “I helped this man do a painting once of a snake moving through leaves,” said Rockwell. “And when we were finished, the snake had completely disappeared from the canvas.”

  “Why did the Titanic meet with disaster?” Thayer demanded of me, as if I were a schoolboy and he the master.

  “Because it hit an iceberg.”

  “And what colour was the iceberg?”

  “White.”

  “Well, there you have it.”

  “Thayer says,” Rockwell clarified, “that a white object floating on a dark sea at night is invisible. And since Roosevelt himself has had white ships under his command, Thayer believed he might have been a kindred spirit.”

  “What does this have to do with the blue jay?” I asked with as much gravity as I could muster.

  “Nothing,” said Rockwell.

  “Everything!” thundered Thayer, the possible presence of the enemy evidently forgotten. “The blue jay is blue and white in order to make itself invisible in shadowed snow, whether Mr. T. Roosevelt believes it or not! That means that anything may appear to disappear!” He had attracted considerable attention in the bar. He pulled out his handkerchief again and mopped his brow. “Forgive me,” he said to the dozen or so curious faces turned in his direction. “I have a nervous disposition.”

  “Henri always says that brilliancy is moving towards colour, not towards white,” I told Thayer, who immediately became even more agitated.

  “You should have a beer,” said Rockwell.

  “I have never touched alcohol.”

  “I’ll bet there is beer in heaven,” said Rockwell. “I’ll bet the angels drink beer. I’ve never seen even a hint of a nervous disposition in your angels, Abbott.” He turned to me. “Thayer paints angels as well,” he said.

  “In 1912,” Thayer said to me, once again ignoring Rockwell’s remarks, “well before the outbreak of the war, I invited Mr. T. Roosevelt to witness the disappearance of the blue jay in the shadowed snow of Central Park. Three or four of the birds had concealed themselves beautifully there in full view of the fifty witnesses who had accompanied me to the spot the week before. The blue feathers are for the shadows, and the white feathers are, of course, for the snow. The smaller, darker markings are there precisely so that you will confuse them with twigs — the markings, of course, not the jay — though there are birds that look exactly like twigs all over and that conceal themselves in dead bushes and the like. Do you know what he wrote to me?”

  I did not.

  “He wrote to me that my experiments with the blue jay and snow have as little relation to real life as would such experiments with ‘a blue-rump baboon by the Mediterranean.’ The audacity! The pomposity! Oh, I am certain he has spoken to the War Department and that is why they ignore my theories of concealing colouration! Why, why are we in this war?”

  “My sentiments exactly,” said
Rockwell.

  It had only been three years since Rockwell, his wife and children, had been turfed out of the British colony of Newfoundland. Rockwell could never understand why his singing of German lieder from a cliff edge at dawn, and at the top of his lungs, should have so upset the authorities. He offered lessons in music appreciation, and when those were refused, he painted a large, fierce German eagle on the outside door of the little building he used as a studio, partly as revenge and partly as a sign of respect for the northern Europeans whose culture he so loved. This was the final straw. He was given notice to leave immediately, though permitted to delay his departure by two weeks when he explained that his children had the measles. He had loved Newfoundland. This war meant that he couldn’t be himself and remain there. He was disgusted when America entered the fray.

  “I’ll tell you why we are in this war,” Rockwell was saying now. “We are in this war so that fat capitalists, like the father of Austin here, so that fat capitalists can get fatter.”

  “Your father is a capitalist, sir?” Thayer looked at me for the first time with genuine interest.

  I felt my face grow red, but said nothing.

  Rockwell assured him that such was the case. “One of the worst,” he said. “Exploits miners, ruins pristine northern landscapes, slaughters virgin forests.”

  Thayer smiled at me. “I have never,” he said, “approved of Kent’s socialist politics.”

  “I’ll say!” said Rockwell. “He threw me right out of his house! Never let me back in the door! Now he only sees me in New York.”

  “A terrible influence on the children,” Thayer confided. “Couldn’t have him spouting all that nonsense in front of the children, and other winged beings.”

  “Look at that bartender,” Rockwell said. “Look at the small dark wings of his bow tie. In his own simple dignity, his ministrations to the tired, decent, honest, working men who visit his establishment, is he not also an angel?”

  Thayer snorted, glared at Rockwell, and once again turned to me with a smile. “I paint winged beings,” he said. “The larger ones are angels, the middle-sized ones are portraits of my children, who are angels but whose wings are cleverly disguised by concealing colouration, and the smaller ones are of birds … some concealed, and some, though it grieves me to say it, hopelessly exposed. Might your father be interested in any of these?”

  “I’m afraid he is no collector,” I replied.

  “Might he then,” Thayer persisted, “know anyone at the War Department? Would my theories of concealing colouration interest your father, do you think?”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” interjected Rockwell. “Capitalists have no imagination, Abbott.”

  “Neither do dogmatists,” retaliated Thayer. “There is nothing winged about them. Dogmatists never hang large, expensive angels in their homes. They will not admit that a zebra’s stripes were made by God to conceal the beast in long, thin weeds.”

  “Hold it,” said Rockwell. “I helped you paint that invisible snake, remember?”

  “That is true, Kent,” said Thayer. “I really wasn’t referring to you … yet. And, as you may gather, I am unwell. I am torn to pieces,” he lamented. “I am tied in knots. Why, why am I in this overheated bar? Why, why am I in this city?” He rose to his feet. “I must conceal myself in the country in the company of my winged creatures.” He placed his bowler hat upon his head. “Goodbye, gentlemen.”

  “I love you, Abbott,” said Rockwell, leaping from his chair and embracing the older man.

  “I love you too, Kent,” said Thayer, “but you are never again to visit my home.”

  “I suppose it must be so,” said Rockwell.

  “Yes, it must,” agreed Thayer. And then, after shaking my hand, he left McSorely’s Ale House, and not too many hours later I assume he left the city of New York.

  “Well, aren’t you the fortunate one,” said Rockwell after the door had closed behind Abbott Thayer.

  “How so?” I asked. I handed Rockwell a cigarette, lit one myself, then passed the lighter to my friend.

  “God, I really do love that man. He introduced me to the Nordic sagas and God knows I love the north. But it was one of the happiest days of my life when I was banished from Thayer’s house. To be a bona fide member of the Thayer school, you realize, it is mandatory to visit his house … often. Now I am a man who loves the snow, the cold. Can you think of anyone who loves it more?”

  I could not.

  “Well, I can,” continued Rockwell. “Thayer loves it even more than me. Aren’t you the lucky one that he didn’t invite you.”

  I wasn’t so sure of this. I had been drawn to the eccentricities of the man. “What’s the problem with the house?” I asked.

  “The problem is, it is completely unheated. Thayer doesn’t believe in any form of artificial heat. Thinks it’s unhealthy.” Rockwell laughed. “I was there once in winter and almost died of pneumonia! Each morning when I woke, my chin was frozen to the blanket, my shoes frozen to the floor. The family sleeps outdoors year-round under makeshift lean-tos. Guests are permitted to bed down indoors. Not that it makes much difference; all the windows are left open. For ventilation! Thayer says that if the men and women of the sagas could live without artificial heat, then so should we. He also says that angels waste away in artificial heat, and Thayer believes that all of his children are angels; though few of them are children any more.”

  Rockwell described his first indoor blizzard. He had been sitting in a wooden armchair — Thayer did not approve of upholstery — talking with the man, when a sudden hard wind from the east had brought driving snow and sleet directly into the room. “Feel it!” Thayer had enthused. “Experience it! Thoreau should have known such indoor weather. He should be here with us.” They had been discussing Waiden at the time.

  Rockwell walked up to the bar and ordered another beer.

  “So, I suppose he is insane,” I said to him when he returned.

  He looked at me with astonishment. “Insane? Absolutely not. He is himself … relentlessly himself. Not a man to change either his art or his character as a result of, for example, a show of contemporary European cubism.”

  His reference to the Armory Show, which had taken place the year before I came to New York, was not lost on me. I myself, influenced by those who had been influenced by it, had attempted one or two cubist nudes.

  I never met Thayer again and, in the early 1920s, I heard that he had died. I wonder what he would have thought of this cold white barn of a house I now live in. He would have approved, undoubtedly, of the lake-effect blizzards that regularly visit this city, but would he have approved of the effect that his brief appearance in my life was to have upon my work? For when the idea of The Erasures began to take shape in my mind I remembered that afternoon in McSorely’s Ale House; the beads of sweat on Thayer’s forehead, the bartender appearing more like a ghost than an angel behind Rockwell’s left shoulder, the tobacco-stain atmosphere of the bar, as if it were mirroring the varnished image Sloan had made of it. I allowed my memory of that afternoon to slide past my friend Rockwell Kent. I did not revisualize the beautiful, assured gestures his hands made as he talked, gestures that would appear in his drawings of men lashed to the masts of ebony-coloured boats. I had laughed at Thayer, but what I had taken into myself on that winter day near the end of the first Great War was not his commendable qualities of energy and uniqueness but rather the idea of concealment.

  Yes, when I began to think about The Erasures, it was to Thayer’s Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom that I turned for instruction, haunting book dealers until I finally found a copy. I did not know, in the beginning, that mere camouflage would not satisfy me. I had no intention of using Thayer’s theories to protect innocent winged beings. No, even by then I had developed sufficient detachment from innocence to want to protect only one being in the world. Me. Thayer’s peacocks screened by emerald forests and blue jays blending with snow were not enough for me. I wanted total di
sguise. I was moving towards white.

  I met Sara at the beginning of the summer of 1920 and left her at the end of the summer of 1935.

  “Fifteen years,” she said.

  “Fifteen summers,” I corrected.

  During the time we were together I was moving away from landscape towards the figure. Occasionally the landscape eased its way into the corner of my figurative work, but the opposite was never true. But then what do all these descriptive labels mean anyway? They are nothing but words. Robert Henri had taught me early on that it was the expression, not the subject, that brought beauty into a work of art. And, oh, how I valued my own expression. Perhaps my creative activity at the time was nothing more than a recital by rote of appropriate learned responses.

  Still, sometimes standing in Sara’s kitchen when she was not there, drawing the discarded work gloves she had used for gardening, or her father’s oiler hanging on a hook on the back of a door, tears would inexplicably enter my eyes. There was something touching, I suppose, about the way she wore her father’s clothing for protection, as if she were placing her soft body, on purpose, inside a layer of his skin. But the truth was that the smallest thing connected to her could move me in the strangest way, cause me to experience something like sorrow.

  Each autumn in New York, as towards the end of the year darkness folded itself around light, I could feel the bright northern summer begin to evaporate, the candles the sun had lit on Superior’s dark waters being put out one by one by my winter life. Finally, by January or February, I would not, despite the intensity of my visual memory, call that shore to mind at all. By then I would be involved in what, in retrospect, I can only call the promotion of my own career, in submitting my works to juried exhibitions, encouraging my dealer — when I finally had a dealer — to mount one-man shows of my work. As time passed, these activities altered only by virtue of the distribution of power among the players involved. After a decade or so I would find myself sitting on the jury rather than being judged, and my dealer would be urging me to bring together a collection of my paintings, my paintings of Sara.