The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  “Sporadic newspaper publicity, the critical attention Debierue provoked in European art reviews, and word-of-mouth discussion of the exhibit, brought a steady stream of visitors to his gallery until May 25, 1925, when he sold his shop for the purpose of painting full time.

  “No. One, naturally, was a picture that lent itself to varied, conflicting opinions. The crack enclosed by the mount, for example, might’ve been on the wall before Debierue hung the frame over it—or else it was made on purpose by the artist. This was a basic, if subjective, decision each critic had to make for himself. The conclusions on this primary premise opened up two diametrically opposed lines of interpretive commentary. The explicit versus the implicit meaning caused angry fluctuations in the press. To hold any opinion meant that one had to see the picture for himself. And the tiny gallery became a ‘must see’ for visiting foreign journalists and art scholars.

  “Most of the commentators concentrated their remarks on the jagged crack within the frame. But there were a few who considered this point immaterial because the crack couldn’t be moved if the frame were to be removed. They were wrong. A critic has to discuss what’s there, not something that may be somewhere else. And he never exhibited it anywhere else after he sold his shop. The consensus, including the opinions of those who actually detested the picture, was an agreement that the crack represented the final and inevitable break between traditional academic art and the new art of the twentieth century. In other words, No. One ushered in what Harold Rosenberg has since called ‘the tradition of the new.’

  “Freudian interpretations were popular, with the usual sexual connotations, but the sharpest splits were between the Dadaists and the Surrealists concerning the irrational aspects of the picture. Most Surrealists (Buñuel was an exception) held the opinion that Debierue had gone too far, feeling that he had reached a point of no return. Dadaists, many of them angered over the use of a gilded baroque mounting, claimed that Debierue hadn’t carried irrationality out far enough to make his point irrevocably meaningless. Neither group denied the powerful impact of No. One on the art of the times.

  “By 1925 Surrealism was no longer a potent art force—although it was revived in the thirties and rejuvenated in the early fifties. And the remaining Dadaists in 1925, those who hadn’t joined André Breton, were largely disorganized. Nevertheless, Debierue’s exhibit was still a strong attraction right up until the day it closed. And it was popular enough with Americans to be included on two different guided tours of Paris offered by tourist agencies.

  “Once Nihilistic Surrealism became established as an independent art movement, Debierue was in demand as a speaker. He turned these offers down, naturally—”

  “Naturally? Doesn’t a speaker usually get paid?”

  “Yes, and he would’ve been well paid. But an artist doesn’t put himself in a defensive position. And that’s what happens to a speaker. A critic’s supposed to speak. He welcomes questions, because his job is to explain what the artist does. The artist is untrained for this sort of thing, and all he does is weaken his position. Some painters go around the country on lecture tours today, carrying racks of slides of their work, and they’re an embarrassed, inarticulate lot. The money’s hard to turn down, I suppose, but in the end they defeat themselves and negate their work. A creative artist has no place on the lecture platform, and that goes for poets and novelists, as well as painters.”

  “So much for the Letters section of The New York Review of Books.”

  “That’s right. At least for poets and novelists. The nonfiction writer is entitled to lecture. He started an argument on purpose when he wrote his book, and he has every right to defend it. But the painter’s work says what it has to say, and the critic interprets it for those who can’t read it.”

  “In that case, you’re responsible to the artist as well as to the public.”

  “I know. That’s what I’ve been talking about. But it’s a challenge, too, and that’s why I’m so excited about interviewing Debierue. When Debierue was preparing to leave Paris, following the closing of his shop and exhibit, he granted an interview to a reporter from Paris Soir. He didn’t say anything about his proposed work in progress, except to state that his painting was too private in meaning for either his intimate friends or the general public. He had decided, he said, not to show any of his future work to the general public, nor to any art critic he considered unqualified to write intelligently about his painting.

  “For the ‘qualified’ critic, in other words, if not for the general public, the door was left ajar.

  “The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached. He wasn’t well-to-do, but the sale of his Montmartre shop would take care of his expenses for several months. The Paris Soir reporter then asked the obvious question. ‘If you refuse to exhibit or to sell your paintings, how will you live?’

  “‘That,’ Debierue replied, ‘isn’t my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.’ With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.

  “Perhaps it was the naivete of his reply that agitated an immediate concern among the painters he had known and befriended. At any rate, an organization named Les Amis de Debierue was formed hastily, within the month following his departure from the city. It’s never disbanded.”

  “There was an organization like that formed for T. S. Eliot, but it disbanded. The purpose was to get Mr. Eliot out of his job at the bank.”

  “I know. But Eliot took another job in publishing. Debierue, so far as we know, never made another picture frame, except for his own work. Les Amis held its first fundraising banquet in Paris, and through this continuing activity enough money was collected to give the artist a small annual subsidy. Other donations are still solicited from art lovers annually. I’ve been giving Les Amis de Debierue at least five bucks a year since I left graduate school.

  “During World War Two, the Germans let Debierue alone. Thanks to two critical articles that had linked his name with Nietzsche, he wasn’t considered as a ‘degenerate’ French artist. And apparently they didn’t discover any of his current work to examine for ‘flaws.’

  “When the Riviera was liberated, it was immediately transformed into an R and R area for U.S. troops, and he was soon visited by art students, now in uniform, who’d read about him in college. They mentioned him in their letters home, and it didn’t take long for American art groups to begin a fresh flow of clothing, food, art supplies, and money to his Riviera outpost.

  “Debierue had survived two world wars, and a dozen ideological battles.

  “The first three reviews of Debierue’s Riviera works, with a nod to symbolisme, are self-explanatory. ‘Fantasy,’ ‘Oblique,’ and ‘Rain’ are the names given to his first three ‘periods’—as assigned by the first three critics who were allowed to examine his paintings. The fourth period, ‘Chironesque,’ is so hermetic it requires some amplification.”

  Berenice nodded in assent.

  “A paucity of scholastic effort was put into the examination of these four important essays. Little has been published, either in book or monograph form as in-depth studies of each period—the way Picasso’s Rose and Blue periods have been covered. This is understandable, because the public never saw any of these pictures.

  “The established critic prefers to examine the original work, or at least colored slides of that work, before he reaches his own conclusions. To refute or to agree with the critic who’s seen the work puts a man on shaky ground. Each new article, as it appeared, however, received considerable attention. But writers were chary of making any expanded judgments based upon the descriptions alone.”

  “Yes, I can understand that.”

  “This general tendency didn’t hold true for Louis Galt’s essay, ‘Debierue: The Chironesque Period,’ which appeared in the Summer, 1958, The Nonobjectivist. It was repri
nted in more than a dozen languages and art journals.

  “Galt, you see, was known as an avowed purist in his approach to nonobjective art, and that’s why he published his article in The Nonobjectivist when he could’ve had it published by Art News for ten times as much money. Galt had once gone so far as to call Mondrian a ‘traitor’ in print when the Dutchman gave up his black-and-white palette to experiment with color in his linear paintings. I didn’t agree with him there, but he made some telling points. But with so many able critics available, all of them anxious to see Debierue’s post–World War Two work, it was considered a damned shame that he’d chosen a purist who would only look at the new work from a prejudiced viewpoint.

  “The appellation ‘Chironesque’ was considered as a derogatory ‘literary’ term. It was deeply resented by Susan Sontag, who said so in The Partisan Review. The Galt essay wasn’t, in all fairness, disrespectful, but Galt stated bluntly that Debierue had retrogressed. He claimed that ‘bicephalous centaurlike creatures’ were clearly visible in the dozen paintings Debierue had shown him. And this forced Galt to conclude that the ‘master’ was now a ‘teacher,’ and that didacticism had no place in contemporary art. The ‘purist’ view, of course.”

  “Of course.” Berenice nodded.

  “At any rate—and here he was reaching for it—because Chiron the centaur was the mythical teacher of Hercules, and other Greek heroes, Galt christened the period ‘Chironesque.’ This was a cunning allusion to the classicism Galt detested, elements Galt would’ve considered regressive in any modern painter.

  “Debierue, of course, said nothing.”

  Berenice nodded and closed her eyes.

  “The controversial Galt essay was well timed. It rejuvenated interest in the old painter, and the ‘bicephalous centaurlike creatures,’ as described by Galt, made the new work resemble—or appear to resemble—Abstract Expressionism. Some wishful thinking was going on. Nineteen fifty-eight wasn’t an exciting pictorial year. Except for a handful of New York painters, called the ‘Sidney Janis Painters,’ after their dealer, the so-called New York School was undergoing a transitional phase. And Debierue was news, of course, because he’d received so little public notice in recent years.”

  Berenice dropped her chin. “Uh huh.”

  “One New York dealer cabled Debierue an offer of fifty thousand dollars for any one of the Chironesque paintings, sight unseen. Debierue acknowledged it by sending back a blank cablegram—with just his type signature. The dealer took advantage of the publicity by blowing up a copy of his offer and Debierue’s reply and by placing the photo blow-ups in the window of his Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Other dealers, who aped and upped the original offer, didn’t receive any replies.

  “How I’ll manage it, I don’t know, Berenice. I know only that I’m determined to be the first critic to see Debierue’s American paintings, and I’ve already decided to call it his ‘American Period’!”

  But I was talking to myself. Berenice, I noticed, with some irritation, had fallen asleep.

  6

  Despite her size, and she was a large woman, Berenice, curled and cramped up in sleep, looked vulnerable to the point of fragility. Her unreasonably long blond lashes swept round flushed cheeks, and her childish face, in repose and without makeup, took several years from her age. Her heavy breasts and big round ass, however, exposed now, as the short flimsy nightgown rode high above her hips, were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face and tangled Alice-in-Wonderland hair. As I examined her, with squinty-eyed, ambivalent interest, a delicate bubble of spit formed in the exact center of her bowed, slightly parted lips.

  Oh, I had put Berenice to sleep all right, with my discursive discussion of Jacques Debierue. With an impatient, involuntary yawn of my own I wondered how much she had understood about Debierue before she had drifted off completely. She had been attentive, of course, as she always was when I talked to her, but she had never asked a serious question. Not that it made much difference. Berenice had a minimal interest in art—or in anything that bordered on abstract thought—and for some time I had suspected that the slight interest she was able to muster occasionally was largely feigned. An effort to please me.

  Except for her adhesive interest in me as a person, or personality, and in matching sexual frequencies, I wondered if anything else had ever stimulated her intellectually. For a woman who had majored in English, and taught the subject (granted, she taught on a high school level), she was surprisingly low on insight into the nature of literature.

  No one could accuse her of being well read, either. Her insights into literature when I had, on occasion, attempted to draw her out, were either sophomoric or parroted generalities remembered from her college English courses. She had an excellent memory for plot lines and the names of characters, but for little else.

  She was probably a poor classroom teacher, I decided. She had such a lazy good-natured disposition she could not have been any great shakes as a disciplinarian. But she would have few disciplinary problems in a city like Duluth, where teenagers were polite incipient Republicans. New York high school students would have had a gentle woman like Berenice in tears within minutes.

  But how did I know? I didn’t. In a power situation, with children, she might inspire terror, fear, and trembling. She never talked about her work and, for all I knew, she might be an expert in grammar and a veritable hotshot in the classroom.

  The persona of a woman in love is highly deceiving.

  Did she feign sentimentality as well as other things? She cried real tears one night when Timmy Fraser sang “My Funny Valentine” at the Red Pirate Lounge—stretching out the song in the mournful way that he does for fully ten minutes. Any woman who fails to recognize the inherent viciousness of Lorenz Hart’s 1930s lyrics has a head filled with cornmeal stirabout instead of brains. She also mentioned once that she had cried for two days over Madame Bovary’s suicide. Fair enough. Flaubert had earned those tears, but she had no insight into the style of the novel, nor did she analyze how Flaubert had maneuvered her emotionally into weeping over the death of that poor, sick woman.

  Knowing this much, and after thinking about it, I realized that I knew very little about her, it was unreasonable of me to expect a wakeful interest from Berenice in Jacques Debierue. Berenice was a funny valentine, that is what she was, and her chin was a little weak, too. In a vague abstract way I loved her. At the same time, I wondered what to do with her. She had been a sounding board to diminish some of the excitement inside me, but now it was two A.M. and I was going to be busy today. Busy, busy. Perhaps if I used her right, she would be an asset. Wouldn’t it help to have a beautiful woman in tow when I called on Debierue? He would hardly slam the door in the face of a strikingly attractive woman. A Frenchman? Never . . .

  The bubble of spit ballooned suddenly as she exhaled, and inaudibly popped. Berenice whimpered in her sleep and tried, wriggling, to find a more comfortable position in her chair. This was impossible. With her long legs cramped up under her rear and in a tight-fitting canvas officer’s chair, it was miraculous that she could fall asleep in the first place.

  I stopped rationalizing, recognizing what I was doing—rationalizing—and prodded Berenice’s soft but rather flat belly with a stiff forefinger.

  “Wake up, Audience,” I said, not unkindly.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” she lied. “I just closed my eyes for a second to rest them.”

  “I know. I forgot to ask, but where have you been the last couple of days?”

  “Here.” Her eyes widened. “Right here.”

  “Not today you weren’t.”

  “Oh, you mean today?”

  “Yes. Today.”

  “I was at Gloria’s apartment. Honestly, I got so blue just sitting around here all alone waiting for you to come back that I called her. She drove over for me and took me in.”

  “I thought as much. Gloria tried to pump me on the phone when I got back. I thought something was odd about her phon
y laughter, but couldn’t figure it out. If you didn’t intend to go back to Duluth, why did you take your bags and leave that weird note for me?”

  “I tried to go, I really did, but I just couldn’t!” Her eyes moistened. “I want to stay with you, James . . . don’t you want me to?”

  I had to forestall her tears. Why can’t women learn how to say “Good-bye” like a man?

  “We’ll see, baby, we’ll see. Let’s go to bed now. We’ll talk about it in the morning, much later this morning.”

  Berenice rose obediently, crossed her arms, and with a sweeping, graceful movement removed her shorty nightgown. No longer sleepy, she grinned wickedly and crawled onto the tumbled Murphy bed, shaking her tremendous stern as she did so. I smiled. She was amusing when she tried to be coy because she was so big. I undressed slowly and crawled in beside her. The air-conditioner, without enough BTUs to cool the apartment adequately, labored away—uh uh, uh uh, uh uh. . . . As a rule I could shut the sound out, but now it bothered me.

  I was tense, slightly high from drinking four cups of black coffee, and overstimulated by my ability to recall, with so little effort, the details of Debierue’s career. Three, no, four days had passed since the last time, and yet, strangely, I wasn’t interested in sex. To make love now would be to initiate a new beginning to a something I had written “ending” to—perhaps that was the reason. That, or my unresolved feelings about Berenice now that I was on the verge of a future—if everything worked out all right—that held no place for a woman who was interested in me as a person. Any relationship between a man and a woman that is based upon bodies and personalities alone can lead only to disaster.

  It was a premonition, or some kind of precognitive instinct for self-preservation, I should have heeded. But at two in the morning, with my mind still reeling with matters intellectual, I was physically unable to muster enough brute bellicosity to toss Berenice and her suitcase down the stairs. She was loving, too loving.