An Artful Corpse

by Helen A. Harrison

  “That’s a good way to make enemies,” she said. “I wonder if his personality will affect the reaction to his Whitney show.”

  “What do you think?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question.

  As they approached Ellen’s building, she reminded TJ that Michele had offered to lend him Woody Guthrie’s autobiography. Not that he needed reminding—he’d been planning to remind her so he’d have an excuse to go up to the apartment.

  They entered the fragrant hallway and trudged up the creaking stairs. Walking behind Ellen, TJ appreciated her graceful navigation of the questionable staircase and admired the long blond hair that managed somehow to shine in the dim light. He kept his own ginger hair unfashionably short to avoid the taunts of the cadets who shared the Police Academy building on East Twentieth Street with John Jay College. Any male student with hair that reached below his earlobes would be called a fucking hippie or a flaming faggot, or hear a voice behind him ask, “Is that a guy or a girl?”

  When they got to the fourth floor, Michele greeted them with her usual ebullience.

  “Thank God you’re here at last,” she cried, jumping up from her chair and embracing them both, as if she’d known TJ forever. “I was dying of existential loneliness, and Kierkegaard gives me the creeps.” She indicated the philosophy textbook open on the dining table. “We have a quiz tomorrow or I wouldn’t be reading that depressing stuff. I’m sure you’ll find Bound for Glory a lot more entertaining.” She marched to the makeshift bookshelf and retrieved it.

  “It came out in 1943, when he was living in New York and involved with the Almanac Singers, but it’s all about his childhood, growing up out West, riding the rails, and surviving the Dust Bowl,” said Michele as she handed the book to TJ. “He illustrated it himself. He could draw as well as write songs, sing, and play the guitar.”

  TJ thanked her and flipped through the book, enjoying Guthrie’s charming sketches drawn from life on the road. Crude but vigorous, they captured the playful aspects of his ramblings as well as some of the darker, more perilous episodes. Meanwhile Ellen brought in two Cokes and set them on the dining table. Michele already had one going.

  “Time for a break, you bookworms,” said Ellen as she popped the bottle caps. “I want to tell Michele about our so-called distinguished visitor to class tonight, Thomas Hart Benton. Turns out he was at The Bitter End on Tuesday. Don’t know if you remember him, he was the little old guy in the lumber jacket. Came in right behind Pete Seeger.”

  “I didn’t notice anyone like that,” said Michele. “Maybe if I saw him again I’d remember. Who is he anyway?”

  “TJ and I will probably never forget him! He’s a famous painter—at least he used to be famous maybe thirty years ago—in town from the Midwest for a show of his work at the Whitney. Mr. Laning invited him to talk to our class, but instead of words of wisdom and helpful criticism we got curses and insults. He’d been drinking, and his language would have made a sailor blush.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer. What did you do?”

  “What could we do? We had to sit there and take it. Actually I got off light because he paid no attention to me or my work. The men had to deal with the crap he was dishing out by the carload. Poor Mr. Laning was so embarrassed, but he managed to get him out the door before he did too much damage to our egos.”

  “You know,” interjected TJ, “our friend Bill said something interesting after Benton left. We were all kind of in shock, but Bill said he thought maybe it was a cover-up act.”

  “Cover-up for what?” asked Michele.

  “That maybe Benton is gay, and was putting on a tough-guy act to mask it. Actually it was Ellen who started us down that road. She said something about him not liking women, and Bill picked up on it.”

  “Interesting,” mused Michele. “Think there’s anything to it?”

  “I know somebody who I bet can give me the lowdown on Benton,” said TJ. “My friend Alfonso will know if there’s anything to what Bill was suggesting. I’ll give him a call tomorrow.”

  Ten

  Wednesday, November 1

  After he determined that the body curled up on the model stand in Studio Nine was in fact dead, Chris Gray experienced what he later described as bewilderment, quickly followed by foreboding. Once his initial shock wore off, he thought maybe the man had been taken ill, collapsed, and died. The way he was huddled, it looked like he’d had a cramp or a spasm. But Chris dismissed that right away, since the body was completely obscured by the drapery. Even if the fellow had tried to cover himself—maybe he got the chills, didn’t that happen with a heart attack or a stroke?—he couldn’t have wrapped himself up like that. No, it appeared that someone else had deliberately covered him. Who would do such a thing, and why?

  With a sinking feeling, Chris realized he knew the answers to those questions.

  Eleven

  Friday, October 6

  Returning home from John Jay on Friday afternoon, TJ found the apartment deserted. Both his parents were still on the job. He dumped his books on the hall table, hung his jacket in the closet, sat down at the telephone stand and dialed 516-324-1472. The call was answered, “The Creeks, Dragon speaking.”

  “Hi, Ted, this is TJ. How are you?”

  “Well, my young friend, this is a surprise, and a very pleasant one. I hope you’re calling to invite yourself for a visit. It’s been weeks since we had the pleasure of your company.”

  “I miss you, too, Ted, but I’m not angling for an invitation. What with college during the week and my job at the candy store on the weekends, I don’t have even one day off. Actually I’m calling because of something that happened in my Thursday night class at the League. I need to ask Alfonso about it. Is he around?”

  “He’s in the studio, finally. He has a New York show coming up in November, and as you know he wasn’t working on it when you and your charming parents were visiting in August. He spent two weeks doing nothing but entertaining the Fitzgeralds, who are a bad influence on him,” teased Ted. But TJ wasn’t falling for his good-natured ribbing.

  “Well, I’m gonna continue the family tradition and interrupt him again,” he said. “Will you please buzz the studio and ask if I can to speak to him? It won’t take long, I promise.”

  “I am here but to serve,” offered Ted with mock humility. “Hold the phone while I see if my master deigns to be interrupted.”

  Moments later the call was switched through to the studio extension. A delighted Ossorio greeted TJ warmly.

  “No, no, don’t apologize, Señor TJ. It’s long past time for a break. I lose all track when I’m working. In fact, I forgot to eat the lunch Ted left for me in the anteroom. If you don’t mind I’ll put down the phone for a moment and retrieve it. And perhaps you’ll forgive my bad manners if I work on my sandwich while you tell me why you’re calling. Otherwise my rumbling stomach may drown you out.”

  As Ossorio belatedly tucked into lunch, TJ described Benton’s visit to the life class and the impression he made on the students. His goal was to find out if Ossorio thought Benton was gay, but not wanting to offend his mentor, he chose his words carefully, starting with a generalization.

  “What do you think of Benton?”

  Having finished half his sandwich, Ossorio took a sip of the iced tea that had long since lost its chill and cleared his throat.

  “Never met the man,” he began, “but Jackson spoke of him often. And of course he has a reputation that lingers in the New York art world long after his departure. Evidently, from what you tell me, he hasn’t mellowed.”

  “What was Pollock’s opinion?”

  Ossorio addressed the artistic aspect of the relationship. “Publicly, Jackson discounted Benton’s influence. He called him ‘a strong personality to react against.’ That was disingenuous, to say the least, but perhaps understandable for an artist whose work seemed, on the surface
at any rate, so antithetical to everything Benton represented. To Benton’s credit he has never repudiated Jackson, and in fact has been very generous in acknowledging his student’s innovations and surprisingly modest in refusing to take credit for them.

  “His chief complaint about modern painting, Jackson’s included, is what he perceives as its lack of content, that it doesn’t communicate what he calls ‘human meanings.’ He goes on about such things at great length in his books, articles, and interviews. He’s an excellent writer, quite the opposite of what you’d expect from someone who presents himself as anti-intellectual. He’s also, I’m told, an eloquent speaker. Unfortunately he doesn’t always show up sober, so his public appearances are sometimes, shall we say, problematic.”

  “He and Pollock had that in common,” remarked TJ, whose own momentary brush with the late artist, driving drunk, was soon followed by the car crash in which he was killed.

  Ossorio continued, “Jackson once told me that the only thing Benton taught him was how to drink a quart of whiskey a day. That was nonsense, and I must say I expressed my disagreement to him. As I said, I’ve never met Benton, but I can see echoes of his aesthetic principles even in Jackson’s most abstract compositions. And there’s another important aspect of Benton’s influence that’s usually overlooked, something that Jackson did own up to when I confronted him.”

  “What do you mean?” asked TJ, intrigued.

  “Benton insisted that his students draw on personal experience—practical knowledge rather than theoretical principles—for inspiration. Of course he was talking about the kind of fieldwork he does himself, cross-country road trips, hanging out with the dirt farmers, coal miners, stevedores, and such. Jackson bought into that American Scene rhetoric in the beginning, but it didn’t sustain him. He soon realized that a more valid form of personal experience was subjective, looking inward for meaning.

  “You and I have often talked about the influence of nature on Jackson’s work, not in terms of subject matter but as an elemental force that motivates the spontaneous outpouring of imagery. Few people appreciate how that relates to Benton’s experiential philosophy because his results and Jackson’s are so different.”

  TJ realized that the discussion was ranging far from the issue he wanted to address. How to take Ossorio back to Benton’s personality, and by extension get to the fraught question of his sexuality?

  “I remember your telling me that Pollock often acted very macho, but that it was a pose to cover up his extreme sensitivity. Do you think he learned that from Benton, too?”

  “No, I think that came from his youth out West, though Benton certainly reinforced it. Things are different now, but back in the early 1930s, when Jackson was a student, artists were considered effete. To call someone ‘artistic’ was almost an insult. The popular image was either a female dilettante painting insipid landscapes en plein air or a limp-wristed male in smock and beret, head in the clouds, toiling away in a garret.

  “Mind you, another common stereotype is the sexually promiscuous artist, male or female, someone who lives outside the social norms of morality. The parties known as artists and models balls that many art schools and societies used to throw annually were viewed as little better than orgies. Who knew what sort of deviant behavior was tolerated, even promoted?”

  This gave TJ the opening he was after. “You mean guys like Benton and Pollock would act tough so no one would think they were deviants?”

  “Yes, I believe that has a lot to do with it. Especially for Benton, whose family didn’t approve of his becoming an artist. Jackson’s mother encouraged him and his brothers, and his father went along, but Benton’s father was dead set against it. He was a hard-drinking, two-fisted politician who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. They were at loggerheads from the time young Tom learned to talk, which meant talking back, one stubborn Missouri mule to another. He wrote about his rebelliousness quite candidly in his memoirs.”

  “But is Benton’s macho act a cover-up? You should have seen him barging around the studio, swearing a blue streak, offending everyone in the class, especially the women. He more or less ignored them and spent his time belittling the men.”

  “That’s his reputation in a nutshell,” said Ossorio. “He seldom has a good word for anyone except his abject followers and those who agree with his jingoistic politics. He plays offense and defense simultaneously, and it’s made him plenty of enemies.”

  This information merely confirmed what TJ already knew or supposed and didn’t get to the question at hand. Ossorio was one of the art world’s most formidable gossips, but apparently all he knew about Benton was common knowledge. TJ realized he’d have to look elsewhere if he wanted to satisfy his curiosity. Maybe it wasn’t worth pursuing, and in fact he wondered why he was so curious in the first place. What difference did it make if Benton was gay or not?

  He checked his watch and realized he needed to leave soon to meet Ellen at the New School, a short walk from his apartment, where they were planning to visit the murals Laning had told them about.

  “Benton’s certainly a peculiar character. I’ve never met anyone like him, and it’s been helpful to get your insights. I really appreciate your taking the time, Alfonso. I apologize for imposing on you. I know you’re busy getting ready for your show next month, so I won’t keep you any longer.”

  Ossorio was his usual gracious self. “No imposition at all, Señor TJ. You know how much I enjoy discussing art with you. You must keep me apprised of your progress at the League. We haven’t spoken of that at all, so we shall have to save it for next time, which I trust will be soon. Until then, buenas tardes y buena suerte.”

  Twelve

  TJ left a note for his parents to let them know he’d be back in an hour or two. They didn’t monitor his comings and goings, but he was a thoughtful son and didn’t want them to worry about him when they expected him to be at home. An only child, he could sense that they were protective, though they kept it well concealed. He’d never given them cause for concern, but they felt it nonetheless. In their line of work they’d encountered too many nice, respectable parents who’d lost their children to gangs or drugs to believe it couldn’t happen to them.

  He caught up with Ellen as she walked down Fifth Avenue from the Union Square subway station toward Twelfth Street. Late afternoon was turning into early evening, and the setting sun’s rays slanted along the crosstown streets, bathing them in the most appealing form of urban daylight. It backlit Ellen, stopped at the corner of Fifth and Thirteenth, as she turned to acknowledge TJ’s call. “Wait up, Ellen, here I am,” he said. Twilight brought out the sheen of her lustrous hair and framed her slender silhouette. Her shapely legs emerging from her plaid miniskirt completed the delightful image, and TJ silently thanked the sun for this visual benison.

  She smiled a greeting, followed by “Hi, there, TJ.” He resisted the urge to kiss her and decided not even to take her hand, just to say hi and return her smile. Their relationship was at that awkward early stage when a false move on his part could spell disaster. He wanted desperately to be more than a friend, but knew that moving too quickly risked putting her off. Then she might decide to quit the life class, and he’d never see her again.

  He sensed that Ellen wasn’t what was known in the locker room as “easy.” Even in those days of counterculture rebellion, when girls were on the pill and boys thought nothing of asking for sex on the first date, he was still a virgin and he assumed she was, too. Of course that was just a guess.

  He really knew nothing about her, except that he was quickly falling in love with her—just like his father had fallen for his mother, more or less at first sight, back in 1943. But they’d been older, both in their midtwenties, and had had other lovers before each other. Their life experience had helped them recognize the signs of mutual attraction, whereas TJ was very much at sea.

  His relationships with other girls had
been platonic or never went beyond soul kissing and heavy petting. Not that he would admit it to his male friends, all of whom, to hear them tell it, had been rutting like stags since puberty. He suspected that much of their talk was just empty boasting, but not all of it for sure. He was too innately honest to indulge in outright fabrication, but he did hint at romantic encounters that went beyond third base. At least he hit home runs in his dreams, which now featured Ellen as the player who embraced him at the plate.

  Walking together, they turned right on West Twelfth Street toward number sixty-six, the New School for Social Research’s sleek International Style building. With an open enrollment policy and progressive philosophy, the New School was a sociopolitical counterpart of the Art Students League. From its inception in 1919 it was devoted, as its motto had it, “to the living spirit.” After the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, many intellectuals fleeing persecution found a safe haven on its faculty.

  The founding director, Alvin Johnson, was responsible for commissioning Joseph Urban, a Viennese-born modernist architect, to design the building, and a Mexican muralist, José Clemente Orozco, to decorate its dining room and lounge. Orozco’s art dealer and lover, Alma Reed, got him the job, and when Benton found out he was furious. Although he admired Orozco, both as an artist and a friend, he envied the Mexican’s reputation as one of the foremost muralists of the day. Reed was Benton’s dealer, too, and she knew very well that after several unsuccessful mural proposals he was itching for such an opportunity.

  Never reticent about self-promotion, he lobbied Johnson and was rewarded with an offer to decorate the walls of the school’s boardroom. Like Orozco, he did the job virtually for free, demanding only an unlimited supply of eggs for the tempera paint he planned to use, in emulation of the old masters. Orozco painted in buon fresco, another age-old European mural medium that had also been used by indigenous Mesoamericans, but Benton had no expertise in that demanding, labor-intensive technique. In fact, notwithstanding his failed schemes, he had no mural experience at all. Yet, with typical grandiosity, he wanted to stand alongside acknowledged master muralists, up there with Giotto, Piero, and Cennini, so he chose egg tempera, the medium they favored.