A Perfect Eye

by Stephanie Kane

  “Enjoying Denver, Paul?” she asked now.

  Like a root canal. “Interesting town.”

  “I’m sure it’s changed in ten years. Weren’t you there on a case?”

  Did she know about Lily? His divorce had never come up on a review. “The traffic’s worse. Now, about that lead—”

  “Are you happy, Paul?” The background noise had stopped. She’d moved to another room.

  “Beg pardon?” he said.

  “I told them to put you up at the Ritz.”

  “Generous of you, Senator.” The suite was the size of his D.C. apartment. He felt kept.

  “George Kurtz has important friends.”

  Has?

  “I assure you his investigation is getting the utmost—”

  “This case can make or break a career, Paul.”

  “I appreciate that, Senator,” he said crisply. “The new lead relates to Kurtz’s son. Before the boy died, he apparently walked on the wild side.”

  “Excellent! He and the burglar make two good prospects.”

  Prospects? His 25-year-old bourbon suddenly tasted like Jim Beam.

  “Good night, Susan.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lily dipped her swab in solvent and rolled it in a tiny circle over the edge of the ballerina’s tutu. She made her own swabs from cotton wool wound onto a thin wooden stick. After each pass, she inspected the bud to make sure she was removing nicotine and varnish, and not paint. Varnish was impossible to remove completely, and Degas’s chalky oils had made the surface thirsty. The ballerina’s varnish had sunk into the paint.

  To prevent contaminating the canvas with residue, she disposed of the cotton in a container with a lid. Then she wrapped a fresh bud around the stick and repeated the process. She should have worn gloves to protect her hands, but cotton was slippery and gloves made it easy to underestimate her grip and force. At night she repaired her hands with an emollient cream.

  She gave Amy the loupe.

  “May I?” Amy said.

  “Of course.”

  She watched Amy inspect the Degas. Since that day at Palette’s, Amy had been helping her clean it. The loupe hovered over the toe shoes.

  “The satin gleams…” Amy said.

  “…but dully, as Degas intended.”

  Because each pigment responded differently to the solvent, she’d divided the painting into sections: the ballerina’s hair—now a soft auburn, instead of an indeterminate brown—her satin slippers, the wall behind the barre. The job was complicated by filaments of cotton wool embedded in the varnish and the fingerprints of whomever had applied it. But inches at a time, the little dancer had slowly awakened.

  The fume extractor over the heat vacuum table abruptly came on. The duct was bigger than an elephant’s trunk and the system ran for minutes at a time, muffling all sound. Other conservators wore headphones to drown out the noise; she liked to keep an ear on her surroundings. Now the elephant’s roar seemed to trumpet her own thrill and pride in bringing the ballerina to life. As she’d suspected, the tutu’s pink was shot with gold.

  “Wow!” Amy said. “How did he do that?”

  An aura suffused the delicate pink. Unvarnished, the painting’s surface was tender, velvety. Like the little dancer herself. Amy’s fingers twitched.

  “Want to help me revarnish her?” Lily said.

  “Oh my God—can I?”

  Revarnishing the Degas was the final step. Much as Lily hated doing it, her mandate was clear: The trustee who owned the painting had been unequivocal and Michel had backed him up. But the little ballerina was just beginning to breathe. She deserved the lightest touch.

  I am a conservator, not a restorer.

  To suit a collector’s taste, restorers thought nothing of painting fig leaves over genitalia in an Old Master. Unscrupulous ones even altered stolen works to reintroduce them into the market. But conservators were of a different stripe. They honored the artist’s intent, not a collector’s whim. Their every act had to be reversible. Each step, including the materials and equipment used, was documented with notes and photographs. No conservator in her right mind would want to replace the tar and yellowed varnish she’d so painstakingly removed, but training and discipline prevailed.

  “Which varnish would you use?” she asked Amy.

  “Matte.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “That’s what Degas would do, if he used varnish at all. Which he didn’t.”

  “Because?”

  “Gloss detracts from a painting,” Amy recited. “It heightens colors and makes them brighter than the artist intended.”

  “We’ll start with a tiny spot. By hand. Not the spray bath.”

  “Of course.”

  With a painting like the Degas, spot-varnishing with a brush was the only way to proceed. The spray bath applied varnish in a uniform stream under a vacuum hood, and the saturated surface it created would destroy the nuances of Degas’s delicate strokes. To ensure the proper varnish was applied, each type was loaded into the bath under its own code. Even with that safeguard, Lily always double-checked it.

  “And she needs time to cure,” she reminded Amy. “The drier the surface—”

  “—the less varnish it absorbs and the more matte the result.”

  Lily switched off the lamps and went to her office. Amy’s imminent departure from the nest exacerbated her own postpartum funk, and Paul’s blowing off her leads still rankled. She shuffled through papers on her desk, then scanned her e-mails.

  2:30 p.m. She scrolled through the crime scene photos, pausing at a close-up of the chair against the wall. That furrow up Kurtz’s torso, his splayed arms converging at his brilliantined poplar-head…

  2:42. She called Nick.

  Nick Lang. Leave a message.

  “It’s me,” she said brightly. “Can I bring a takeout?” Feeling foolish, she hung up.

  She logged onto the museum’s database to see if it had anything on the ballerina. It was in the trustee’s private collection, at least until Michel pried it from his cold, dead, nicotine-stained fingers. What idiot had coated it with that godawful varnish? Nothing.

  2:56. Too early to go home.

  She hopscotched through the European & American collection. At Seven, she paused. It was presumed to have been painted in 1884, after Caillebotte retired to Petit-Gennevilliers and did the six other landscapes in the series; that it was undated and unsigned wasn’t unusual for him or his contemporaries. Was it just a pawn in Kurtz’s tax-evasion scheme, as Angela said? But something drew him to that canvas and put them both in the murderer’s path. Every painting had a story. The art world called it provenance.

  Constructing and deconstructing provenance was itself an art, and the Schiele had given her a taste of the detective work required. Working with Paul taught her one thing: faking a provenance was harder than forging a painting itself, because you had to rewrite history by salting the record with things you made up. Even assembling a legitimate provenance required skill, patience and luck.

  Dates, places, buyers and sellers were historical facts that could be ferreted from libraries, databases and catalogues raisonnés. Like stamps on a passport or stickers on a steamer trunk, labels on the back of a canvas or frame were a visual record of when and where a painting was exhibited. Because the art world thrived on secrecy, labels were often coded. Compounding the challenge, an unbroken chain of ownership was the exception and not the rule. What was Seven’s story? She dove into the museum’s annotated database.

  Elena always said the more provenance, the better; assuring a buyer a work was authentic and providing a sexy history increased its value and cachet. Seven’s notes did not disappoint. Lily read through its provenance twice. Starting with Caillebotte and working her way up to Kurtz, then from Kurtz backwards on down.

  Caillebotte had no direct descendent. When he died of a stroke at age forty-five in 1894, Seven went to a woman named Charlotte Berthier. Charlotte left Seven to a nephe
w who died in 1918 on the Western Front. In 1929, the nephew’s stepsister sold it to a collector in Paris whose family held it for the next eighty years. Because the collector’s grandson couldn’t afford to insure the painting, he sold it to Kurtz. Until then, Seven had never been publicly shown. Because it wasn’t listed in Caillebotte’s catalogue raisonné, Morley Sullivan demanded proof that it was authentic.

  The collector’s grandson produced two expert opinions and an affidavit his grandfather wrote in 1936. Granddad had seen a handwritten letter from Caillebotte to Monet dated July 1884, in which Caillebotte described Seven as a breakthrough and the last in his Gennevilliers Plain series. Finally, Caillebotte’s sketchbook was said to contain an early study of Seven.

  What’s missing that should be there?

  Seven’s provenance was a handful of data points: 1884, Monet, Charlotte Berthier, a Parisian collector in 1929, his affidavit in 1936, the sketchbook. Why didn’t the collector show the painting, or lend it to a museum?

  “What are you doing?” Amy was at the door.

  “Reading up on Seven.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s more to a painting than pigment and brush stroke, Amy.”

  “I know that, Lily! I thought you respected my work.”

  “Of course I do. That’s not—”

  “Dave understands!”

  Is she having guy trouble? “I’m letting you work on the Degas.”

  Amy looked down. “Need anything before I go?”

  “No, have a great weekend.”

  “I’ll lock up.”

  Despite the gaps, Seven seemed pretty straightforward.

  But what about Caillebotte, the man?

  In photos, he was small and round-shouldered. He had a pointed face and chin, ears flush to his skull, and a gaze like a fox. His affluent father built him a studio with a balcony and skylight. At age twenty-five, he was accepted at the Academy des Beaux Arts. But instead of according him the recognition given Monet, Renoir and Degas, critics savaged him.

  Early recognition was a curse—look at Amy, copying masterpieces years after winning her big prize. Did it crush Caillebotte?

  In 1881, he retreated to a timber-and-stone house with a red tile roof at Petit-Gennevilliers. During his “lost years” of the mid-1880s, he produced his only known sketchbook, painted the Gennevilliers Plain series, and in June 1883 wrote to Monet about his struggles with landscapes. A letter survived: For the two months that I have been here I have worked as much as I could—but everything I do is really bad.

  How bad could a genius’s work be?

  The Art Institute of Chicago had posted Caillebotte’s sketchbook on the web. Forty drawings in graphite and watercolor: panoramas and forests, a village and church, pollarded willow trees. None of the studies resembled Seven or contained a man. Two works stood out: a sensitive portrait of a prepubescent boy, and a woman at an open window. The boy’s face was softly shaded. His lips were tender. He had a rounded chin and wore a floppy bow at the collar of what could have been a choir robe. The woman was far less detailed; the balustrade on which she leaned was more distinct than she was.

  Why didn’t he marry?

  She searched for Charlotte Berthier and up popped two paintings: Renoir’s Mademoiselle Charlotte Berthier and Caillebotte’s Madame Anne-Marie Hagen.

  Renoir’s Charlotte was as frothy and French as her name. Round-faced, rosy-cheeked and plump like all of Renoir’s women, she posed in the summer of 1883 in a plumed bonnet and pink frock with a small dog in her lap. Doe-like eyes gazing down and to the side made her seem timid, a trifle out of her element. Caillebotte’s Madame Hagen, on the other hand, was anything but. Her very name echoed the directness of her stare and the Teutonic severity of her high-necked navy silk dress and black velvet hat. All she needed was a riding crop or whip. Could they be the same woman?

  A few more clicks produced the answer. When Caillebotte left Charlotte an annuity and his house in Petit-Gennevilliers, his brothers affirmed in a notarized document that she and Anne-Marie were one woman whose real name was Hagen. Did he reinvent severe Anne-Marie as saccharine Charlotte to maintain his bourgeois respectability in Petit-Gennevilliers? Was mannish Madame Hagan more to his taste?

  Lily leaned back in her chair. Kurtz wasn’t the only one with a kinky private life, but at least the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of Seven rang true. Insuring Impressionist masterpieces was astronomically expensive. Kurtz did buy exclusively through Sully, an Impressionist expert, and Elena said Sully was no fool….

  But what drew Kurtz to Seven?

  Kurtz was always in search of a conquest. He’d coveted the Qianlong vase because he fell for the Manchu Emperor. Did the mystery surrounding Charlotte lure him, or was he attracted to Caillebotte himself?

  And Sjostrom’s theory?

  Caillebotte was a forger’s dream. He was wealthy enough to be under no pressure to sell, and his small body of work was scattered. But why choose him specifically? Forgers don’t do it for money, they do it to prove a point. Lily itched to take Sevendown and properly examine it. The gallery was closed, but Monday—

  “Hey.”

  She looked up.

  “Got tired of waiting for takeout,” Nick said. “I saw Amy downstairs. She let me in.”

  Lily grabbed her backpack and they walked out. At the heat vacuum table, Nick stopped. There lay the ballerina on her coverlet.

  “I could get into that.” His leer was almost as convincing as Paul’s. “Pity to varnish her.”

  The dancer losing her innocence all over again reminded her of Jack. He’d physically recovered from his fall, but his assailant had robbed him of his swagger.

  She shivered.

  “Cold?” Nick put his arm around her. He was looking at the double-wide table’s dual controls. “A king-sized sleep number bed with a quilt! How about trying it out?” His grip tightened, and he nipped her hard on the neck. She drew back. His blue eyes seemed darker, almost black. He was staring at the ballerina. “I bet she’d like to watch.”

  “What?”

  Just as suddenly, he was Nick again. He flashed his roguish grin. “Guess I need to work on my lines.”

  With a last look at the ballerina, Lily switched off the light and locked the door behind them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  First came the line.

  As he drew his pencil slowly across the paper, he reminded himself of two truths: Every great painting begins with a drawing, and every drawing begins with a line. What did the line depend on? A wise professor said comprehension came with proficiency.

  Practice, practice, practice.

  No artist achieved spontaneity without practice, not even Caillebotte. He sketched in graphite, charcoal and oil. He based his landscapes on plein air études and finished them in his studio later. He obsessively relocated his borders, vertically bisecting one boulevardier striding self-importantly out of the frame and reducing another to a pair of legs under an umbrella. His compositions were grand experiments, all part of the fun.

  He squinted at the vase he was sketching. He elongated the line, then shaded it with the side of his pencil. The curve still wasn’t right. The line should be thinner, of equidistant width. He went back to using the tip. Compositional alterations had a lovely name: pentimenti, the artist’s regrets. Working on a head or a hand, an Old Master might rapidly sketch different positions and superimpose them over each other on his paper or canvas as he finessed the line. Pentimenti could lurk for centuries, reemerging when the paint became transparent with age; as windows into the Master’s creative process and intent, they made a painting real. And they endured as relics of his refinement of vision, his smoothing and sharpening of the image, just as a forger honed his blade. He laughed at his bon mot.

  Forger—honorable in one trade, despicable in another. So unfair, such a myth! He bore down too hard with his pencil. The tip broke and gouged the cream paper. He started again on a fresh part of the page.
<
br />   A forger isn’t an artist.

  To fool the experts, you had to be twice as skilled as the Master himself. First you ruthlessly analyzed your own style to eliminate your mannerisms and “signature.” Next came tempo: replicating the ease and speed of the Master’s stroke. You picked a painting and copied it as quickly as possible, or deconstructed the artist’s process and—practice, practice, practice—followed his path. Flow was crucial; without it, the lines were heavy-handed and stiff. A fluid, sinuous line in one part of the canvas and an awkward, hesitant one elsewhere was how you got caught.

  A forger lacks passion.

  They’d have you believe a successful forgery was a bag of tricks! But once you mastered style, the final canvas couldn’t just be a copy. Like Seven, it had to be better than the other six. A convincing provenance required more research. In Chicago they’d made him wear gloves to look at Caillebotte’s sketchbook. Four sheets in front of the choirboy had been torn out, but the stubs still showed traces of graphite. What didn’t he want the world to see? No sketches, of course, of the male nudes toweling themselves after a bath that he’d painted at the same time. Nor any trace of so-called Charlotte Berthier, the dominatrix he’d reinvented as his beard! No, when he’d read Caillebotte’s June 1883 letter to Monet bitching about his landscapes, he immediately knew what was missing.

  Caillebotte needed a man to make it real.

  It had been child’s play to fabricate a second letter to Monet dated a year later, in which Caillebotte tantalizingly mentioned a breakthrough. He’d painted the mysterious little man hurrying to the trees in Seven to entice Kurtz, adding a brimmed hat worthy of Caillebotte himself. How Caillebotte loved his hats! Top hats, sailing caps, straw boaters…. How could Kurtz resist? Why, Seven’s little man was as seductive as Junie, whom he’d used to lure his own father! The memory made him frown again.