Larry Witham's Blog: Novelists on Artists, page 2
April 18, 2016
Tracking Down the ‘Italian Art Squad’ in Fiction (no. 42)
The First of International Art Crime Team a Natural for Art Novels
MEET THE "ITALIAN Art Squad" in fiction. In the real world, it was formed in 1969 as a seminal event, the first national police force in the world dedicated to art crime. The squad began to appear in novels in 1991, and since then, three authors have tapped the Italian institution’s bravado, or otherwise, to craft stories of crime, art and mystery.
The first out the gate was British novelist Ian Pears. The Raphael Affair (1991) launched his “art history” mysteries (seven installments through 2000) with the story of a forlorn British art history academic in Rome meeting his match, a female art-crime investigator.
He is Jonathan Argyll and she is Flavia di Stefano, the “brightest assistant in the Italian National Art Theft Squad,” according to her boss, General Taddeo Bottando. Argyll, unable to land a good job, has become a traveling agent looking for good art purchases for a London art dealer. This takes him to Rome, embroils him in an art theft and murder, and mingles his and Flavia’s lives.
She is all business, a feisty northern Italian. In contrast, Argyll’s detective instincts prevail in spite of his bookish self. In each novel, while General Bottando fights for his budget, and against the Italian police bureaucracy, Jonathan and Flavia—sometimes he in the lead, sometimes she—traipse into murder cases linked to art world figures, typically academics, collectors, and dealers.
The delight of these novels is not so much the cache of art information (which Pears leaves to a bare minimum) as the dialogue between Jonathan and Flavia. She is “a woman with a long-standing disapproval of those who smuggle the Italian heritage out of the country,” Jonathan reports.
They start out getting on each other’s nerves. Even by novel no. 3, The Bernini Bust (1993), the story laments that: “She was a wonderful companion and a perfect friend, but though Argyll had worked hard to persuade her to be something more, his labors had produced remarkably little result.” That would change, of course. By the last novel, they are married and teaming up on art crime.
Taking up the art-squad-fiction-baton in 2007, art historian Noah Charney wrote The Art Thief. He did so as director of an institute for the study of international art crime. The novel, much more of an academic treatise than anything in Pears’s works, opens with the theft of a Caravaggio painting in a small Italian church. Indeed, as one of the lengthy lectures in the novel explicates, it was a 1969 theft of a Caravaggio that prompted the founding of the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, or Carabinieri Art Squad (the Carabinieri being the Italian military and civilian police).
The Art Thief follows a veritable maze of clues related to the theft of the Caravaggio and a “white on white” painting by the Russian “Suprematist” Kazimir Malevich. It also takes pains to show the workings of the Carabinieri and art squads in London (Scotland Yard) and France. One of the art thieves (we learn in the end) is Gabriel Coffin, a former special investigator for the Italian Art Squad. He has helped his lover, Daniela Vallombroso, wreak revenge on a former client who framed her for a past theft, putting her in prison.
All of this novel plotting involves a good deal of technical explanation about forgery, overpainting, and cleaning. It keeps the reader’s head spinning. In all, however, it boils down to Daniela’s victory over a corrupt collector, in fact, the very man who had hired Coffin to steal the Caravaggio. With Coffin’s help, Daniela has tricked her nemesis out of the Caravaggio, and, “We’ve also deprived him of his family’s greatest treasure, his original White on White,” she summarizes.
To tell this story, novelist Charney has the Caravaggio and Malevich paintings interchanging quite a lot, both having fake versions and then this: In the end, in a secret art room, Coffin shows Daniela how he can remove the ‘white on white” with a mild solvent to reveal the authentic Caravaggio (a fake having been returned to the Carabinieri).
Then in 2013, the first novel of the “Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries” series, written by former Foreign Service officer David P Wagner, presents another take on the Italian Art Squad. Rick Montoya, who had studied in Italy as son of a diplomat, returns as a professional translator. To boot, his uncle is an Italian policeman. Rick’s old school friend is now head of Rome’s art squad, bearing the title Commissario Carlo Conti. He sends Rick north on a surreptitious mission.
The suspected crime is the smuggling and forgery of pre-Roman Etruscan stoneware, valuable artifacts in the national culture. The scene of the misdeeds is Tuscany, specifically, the picturesque hill town of Volterra. Rick’s task quickly becomes ominous when, a day after he visits a gallery, one of its staff falls over a steep city cliff to his death.
After arriving in the steep town, Rick gradually meets three suspects on Commissario Conti’s list: museum curator Arnolfo Zerbino; gallery owner Antonio Landi; and, import/export man Rino Polpetto. Rick also becomes romantically caught between his old American girlfriend, an art historian in Italy, and a gorgeous but shady local art dealer, Donatella, who seems to pursue him (and she, too, may be the villain). Moreover, the police in Volterra seem to resent Rick sticking his nose into their affairs. They follow him darkly. Even they seem likely suspects.
We go down the list of possible villains, always feeling we’ve found him or her, and of course, it’s the person not on the A-list, or seemingly the most blameless of them all. Rick always thought it was Landi. But it turns out to be Zerbino, a learned man who is supposed to be a guardian of the national patrimony. Instead, he is discreetly selling the museum’s real Etruscan artifacts for money to support its upkeep, and then hires craftsmen to make fakes to take their place in the secure glass exhibit shelves.
The story ends, as it must in Italy, with a good Italian meal.
MEET THE "ITALIAN Art Squad" in fiction. In the real world, it was formed in 1969 as a seminal event, the first national police force in the world dedicated to art crime. The squad began to appear in novels in 1991, and since then, three authors have tapped the Italian institution’s bravado, or otherwise, to craft stories of crime, art and mystery.
The first out the gate was British novelist Ian Pears. The Raphael Affair (1991) launched his “art history” mysteries (seven installments through 2000) with the story of a forlorn British art history academic in Rome meeting his match, a female art-crime investigator.
He is Jonathan Argyll and she is Flavia di Stefano, the “brightest assistant in the Italian National Art Theft Squad,” according to her boss, General Taddeo Bottando. Argyll, unable to land a good job, has become a traveling agent looking for good art purchases for a London art dealer. This takes him to Rome, embroils him in an art theft and murder, and mingles his and Flavia’s lives.
She is all business, a feisty northern Italian. In contrast, Argyll’s detective instincts prevail in spite of his bookish self. In each novel, while General Bottando fights for his budget, and against the Italian police bureaucracy, Jonathan and Flavia—sometimes he in the lead, sometimes she—traipse into murder cases linked to art world figures, typically academics, collectors, and dealers.
The delight of these novels is not so much the cache of art information (which Pears leaves to a bare minimum) as the dialogue between Jonathan and Flavia. She is “a woman with a long-standing disapproval of those who smuggle the Italian heritage out of the country,” Jonathan reports.
They start out getting on each other’s nerves. Even by novel no. 3, The Bernini Bust (1993), the story laments that: “She was a wonderful companion and a perfect friend, but though Argyll had worked hard to persuade her to be something more, his labors had produced remarkably little result.” That would change, of course. By the last novel, they are married and teaming up on art crime.
Taking up the art-squad-fiction-baton in 2007, art historian Noah Charney wrote The Art Thief. He did so as director of an institute for the study of international art crime. The novel, much more of an academic treatise than anything in Pears’s works, opens with the theft of a Caravaggio painting in a small Italian church. Indeed, as one of the lengthy lectures in the novel explicates, it was a 1969 theft of a Caravaggio that prompted the founding of the Comando Carabinieri per la Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale, or Carabinieri Art Squad (the Carabinieri being the Italian military and civilian police).
The Art Thief follows a veritable maze of clues related to the theft of the Caravaggio and a “white on white” painting by the Russian “Suprematist” Kazimir Malevich. It also takes pains to show the workings of the Carabinieri and art squads in London (Scotland Yard) and France. One of the art thieves (we learn in the end) is Gabriel Coffin, a former special investigator for the Italian Art Squad. He has helped his lover, Daniela Vallombroso, wreak revenge on a former client who framed her for a past theft, putting her in prison.
All of this novel plotting involves a good deal of technical explanation about forgery, overpainting, and cleaning. It keeps the reader’s head spinning. In all, however, it boils down to Daniela’s victory over a corrupt collector, in fact, the very man who had hired Coffin to steal the Caravaggio. With Coffin’s help, Daniela has tricked her nemesis out of the Caravaggio, and, “We’ve also deprived him of his family’s greatest treasure, his original White on White,” she summarizes.
To tell this story, novelist Charney has the Caravaggio and Malevich paintings interchanging quite a lot, both having fake versions and then this: In the end, in a secret art room, Coffin shows Daniela how he can remove the ‘white on white” with a mild solvent to reveal the authentic Caravaggio (a fake having been returned to the Carabinieri).
Then in 2013, the first novel of the “Rick Montoya Italian Mysteries” series, written by former Foreign Service officer David P Wagner, presents another take on the Italian Art Squad. Rick Montoya, who had studied in Italy as son of a diplomat, returns as a professional translator. To boot, his uncle is an Italian policeman. Rick’s old school friend is now head of Rome’s art squad, bearing the title Commissario Carlo Conti. He sends Rick north on a surreptitious mission.
The suspected crime is the smuggling and forgery of pre-Roman Etruscan stoneware, valuable artifacts in the national culture. The scene of the misdeeds is Tuscany, specifically, the picturesque hill town of Volterra. Rick’s task quickly becomes ominous when, a day after he visits a gallery, one of its staff falls over a steep city cliff to his death.
After arriving in the steep town, Rick gradually meets three suspects on Commissario Conti’s list: museum curator Arnolfo Zerbino; gallery owner Antonio Landi; and, import/export man Rino Polpetto. Rick also becomes romantically caught between his old American girlfriend, an art historian in Italy, and a gorgeous but shady local art dealer, Donatella, who seems to pursue him (and she, too, may be the villain). Moreover, the police in Volterra seem to resent Rick sticking his nose into their affairs. They follow him darkly. Even they seem likely suspects.
We go down the list of possible villains, always feeling we’ve found him or her, and of course, it’s the person not on the A-list, or seemingly the most blameless of them all. Rick always thought it was Landi. But it turns out to be Zerbino, a learned man who is supposed to be a guardian of the national patrimony. Instead, he is discreetly selling the museum’s real Etruscan artifacts for money to support its upkeep, and then hires craftsmen to make fakes to take their place in the secure glass exhibit shelves.
The story ends, as it must in Italy, with a good Italian meal.
April 14, 2016
Hollywood Can be a Stage Set for the Art Novel (no. 41)
Three Works of Fiction Join This LA Atmosphere to an Art Plot
ON OCCASION, THE Academy Awards season will prompt a movie critic to list the best American novels that “hold a mirror to Hollywood.” The number barely tops ten, and so novels about Hollywood and the art world are rarer still.
There are at least three Hollywood novels with art themes. One of them, Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust (1939), has been ranked as a great American novel. Its two successors are far humbler, yet all three have some traits in common.
One of them is the craziness of the film industry. In Day of the Locust, the hero, a Yale-trained artist named Todd Hackett, unmasks all the illusions of Tinseltown in the 1930s. The narrative also focuses on the career failures of Faye, a young bit actress. The story ends with the public rioting at a world premier movie, disillusioned by all it represents.
The film industry does not come off much better in two contemporary novels. Hollywood Hills (2010) is one of Joseph Wambaugh’s wacky Hollywood-cops series. The plot tracks around a painting stolen from a B-movie director’s home. In The Monet Murders (2015), Terry Mort introduces Riley Fitzhugh, a “private investigator to the stars.” It is a humorous riff on the 1930s hardboiled detective and Fitzhugh’s habit of sending girl friends to have a “screen test.”
That suggests the second common theme: the quest of aspiring talent to make it in the movies. At the heart of Day of the Locust is Faye’s quest, and in Wambaugh’s Hollywood Hills even the main cop character (“Hollywood Nate” Weiss) moonlights as a screen actor.
A third and final feature of these three Hollywood-and-art novels is the ambiance of Southern California, focused on Hollywood mansions, poolside scenes, and coastal drives.
So, what are the art elements in these three works?
Day of the Locust is richest in this respect. The main character is an artist. Unable to find work after his fine-arts training, Hackett arrives in LA to draw costumes. He is recruited by telegram and grabs the Hollywood job “despite the arguments of his friends, who were certain that he was selling out and would never paint again.”
In Los Angeles, Hackett sees a weary race of workers, disillusioned and bored. “They discover that sunshine isn’t enough.” They expected Hollywood movies to give them their silver lining. Hackett is fascinated by the illusions of large Hollywood sets and by this smoldering plebian population. They are “the people he felt he must paint,” but paint in the ominous style of a Goya or Daumier, or in the manner of the old Italian “painters of decay and mystery.”
Hackett soon envisions a painting to be titled The Burning of Los Angeles. He sketches it over the following weeks, seeing in his vision the city on fire and an unhappy population that “sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.”
And so it happens in the end, ignited by the riot outside Kahn’s Palace Theater. The riot is indistinguishable from Hackett’s vision for the painting. In effect, he predicts Hollywood’s fate, even though he “was an artist, not a prophet.” If he ever completes the painting, though, it will “not be judged by the accuracy with which it foretold a future event, but by its merits as painting.” The artist escapes the riot with an injured leg.
Like other authors who’ve put Hollywood in fiction, West had been a screen writer there in the 1930s. In our day, Wambaugh had been a member of the LAPD. He’s also helped write screen plays Hollywood film treatments of his novels.
As an art-crime story, Hollywood Hills introduces us to a shady Hollywood art dealer (who eventually has his head blown off). The dealer has become a link between two different crimes. One is the doings of a young ex-con caretaker at the home of a “B-list director.” The art dealer, nearly bankrupt, sells art to director’s heiress wife, and he persuades the ex-con caretaker to steal two valuable paintings and replace them with exact photo prints.
At the same moment, however, two other petty crooks arrive. They are a loser and his girlfriend, both addicted to drugs. To support their habit, they decide to mimic what the newspapers are calling “bling ring” thefts from wealthy homes. On their first exploit up in Hollywood hills, they steal the van in which the ex-con caretaker had put the stolen paintings.
As “Hollywood Nate” gradually figures out what is happening, the drug user has a final show-down with the art dealer during a painting-ransom exchange. Those two do not end well. However, the girl goes home to her Oregon family and into rehab; and the ex-con (who wanted to go straight as a cook-butler) happily escape any charges.
Terry Mort’s The Monet Murders, a first person detective narrative, takes us back to 1934, the same era in which Nathaniel West wrote. We follow PI “to the stars” Fitzhugh after he’s hired by a married woman whose artist boyfriend-on-the-side has taken her Monet painting (and put a fake copy in its place). A day or so later, the woman shoots the artist and then (apparently) herself. We learn at the end, however, that her B-movie director husband was trying to get the painting to pay his gambling debts; at his behest, the mob killed her, apparently, and then will kill him once he’s paid up.
Meanwhile, Fitzhugh meets UCLA art history professor Dennis Finch-Hayden. Their dialogue treats us to lengthy discussions on art forgery and art crime. “I’m best known for my work on the French Impressionists,” Finch-Hayden says. “As a sideline, I’ve often helped place artwork with private buyers.”
Asks Fitzhugh: “Ever placed a piece of stolen art?”
The art historian replies, “Not knowingly . . . [No] one knows the whereabouts of every piece of an important artist’s work.” It seems, in fact, that the art professor ends up with the real painting (the novel’s outcome is a bit opaque), since he comes to a movie-opening party in a new Rolls Royce that cost exactly what the stolen Monet would have brought on the black market. As an artist himself, he, too, may have just copied the authentic Monet and returned the forgery as a substitute. As Finch-Hayden says, “It is a wicked world, I’m afraid. You have no idea of the passion of a true collector.”
ON OCCASION, THE Academy Awards season will prompt a movie critic to list the best American novels that “hold a mirror to Hollywood.” The number barely tops ten, and so novels about Hollywood and the art world are rarer still.
There are at least three Hollywood novels with art themes. One of them, Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust (1939), has been ranked as a great American novel. Its two successors are far humbler, yet all three have some traits in common.
One of them is the craziness of the film industry. In Day of the Locust, the hero, a Yale-trained artist named Todd Hackett, unmasks all the illusions of Tinseltown in the 1930s. The narrative also focuses on the career failures of Faye, a young bit actress. The story ends with the public rioting at a world premier movie, disillusioned by all it represents.
The film industry does not come off much better in two contemporary novels. Hollywood Hills (2010) is one of Joseph Wambaugh’s wacky Hollywood-cops series. The plot tracks around a painting stolen from a B-movie director’s home. In The Monet Murders (2015), Terry Mort introduces Riley Fitzhugh, a “private investigator to the stars.” It is a humorous riff on the 1930s hardboiled detective and Fitzhugh’s habit of sending girl friends to have a “screen test.”
That suggests the second common theme: the quest of aspiring talent to make it in the movies. At the heart of Day of the Locust is Faye’s quest, and in Wambaugh’s Hollywood Hills even the main cop character (“Hollywood Nate” Weiss) moonlights as a screen actor.
A third and final feature of these three Hollywood-and-art novels is the ambiance of Southern California, focused on Hollywood mansions, poolside scenes, and coastal drives.
So, what are the art elements in these three works?
Day of the Locust is richest in this respect. The main character is an artist. Unable to find work after his fine-arts training, Hackett arrives in LA to draw costumes. He is recruited by telegram and grabs the Hollywood job “despite the arguments of his friends, who were certain that he was selling out and would never paint again.”
In Los Angeles, Hackett sees a weary race of workers, disillusioned and bored. “They discover that sunshine isn’t enough.” They expected Hollywood movies to give them their silver lining. Hackett is fascinated by the illusions of large Hollywood sets and by this smoldering plebian population. They are “the people he felt he must paint,” but paint in the ominous style of a Goya or Daumier, or in the manner of the old Italian “painters of decay and mystery.”
Hackett soon envisions a painting to be titled The Burning of Los Angeles. He sketches it over the following weeks, seeing in his vision the city on fire and an unhappy population that “sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.”
And so it happens in the end, ignited by the riot outside Kahn’s Palace Theater. The riot is indistinguishable from Hackett’s vision for the painting. In effect, he predicts Hollywood’s fate, even though he “was an artist, not a prophet.” If he ever completes the painting, though, it will “not be judged by the accuracy with which it foretold a future event, but by its merits as painting.” The artist escapes the riot with an injured leg.
Like other authors who’ve put Hollywood in fiction, West had been a screen writer there in the 1930s. In our day, Wambaugh had been a member of the LAPD. He’s also helped write screen plays Hollywood film treatments of his novels.
As an art-crime story, Hollywood Hills introduces us to a shady Hollywood art dealer (who eventually has his head blown off). The dealer has become a link between two different crimes. One is the doings of a young ex-con caretaker at the home of a “B-list director.” The art dealer, nearly bankrupt, sells art to director’s heiress wife, and he persuades the ex-con caretaker to steal two valuable paintings and replace them with exact photo prints.
At the same moment, however, two other petty crooks arrive. They are a loser and his girlfriend, both addicted to drugs. To support their habit, they decide to mimic what the newspapers are calling “bling ring” thefts from wealthy homes. On their first exploit up in Hollywood hills, they steal the van in which the ex-con caretaker had put the stolen paintings.
As “Hollywood Nate” gradually figures out what is happening, the drug user has a final show-down with the art dealer during a painting-ransom exchange. Those two do not end well. However, the girl goes home to her Oregon family and into rehab; and the ex-con (who wanted to go straight as a cook-butler) happily escape any charges.
Terry Mort’s The Monet Murders, a first person detective narrative, takes us back to 1934, the same era in which Nathaniel West wrote. We follow PI “to the stars” Fitzhugh after he’s hired by a married woman whose artist boyfriend-on-the-side has taken her Monet painting (and put a fake copy in its place). A day or so later, the woman shoots the artist and then (apparently) herself. We learn at the end, however, that her B-movie director husband was trying to get the painting to pay his gambling debts; at his behest, the mob killed her, apparently, and then will kill him once he’s paid up.
Meanwhile, Fitzhugh meets UCLA art history professor Dennis Finch-Hayden. Their dialogue treats us to lengthy discussions on art forgery and art crime. “I’m best known for my work on the French Impressionists,” Finch-Hayden says. “As a sideline, I’ve often helped place artwork with private buyers.”
Asks Fitzhugh: “Ever placed a piece of stolen art?”
The art historian replies, “Not knowingly . . . [No] one knows the whereabouts of every piece of an important artist’s work.” It seems, in fact, that the art professor ends up with the real painting (the novel’s outcome is a bit opaque), since he comes to a movie-opening party in a new Rolls Royce that cost exactly what the stolen Monet would have brought on the black market. As an artist himself, he, too, may have just copied the authentic Monet and returned the forgery as a substitute. As Finch-Hayden says, “It is a wicked world, I’m afraid. You have no idea of the passion of a true collector.”
April 11, 2016
Murder Novels about Cézanne Focus on a Mysterious Mistress (no. 40)
Two Authors Journey to Provenance for a Girl’s Portrait
SO YOU WANT to write a novel about Paul Cézanne, the French Postimpressionist painter. Three elements will suffice: the tale of Cézanne’s secret girlfriend, a murder, and a painting of the girl. The splendid backdrop of Provenance, the painter’s native region in the south of France, will also be a great plus.
These are the precise elements employed in two recent novels with Cézanne as the centerpiece. In 2009, art historian Barbara Corrado Pope gave us Cézanne’s Quarry: A Mystery. Then in 2015 we have M. L. Longworth’s The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne.
Cézanne’s life has its knowns and unknowns. One mostly-accepted belief is that he had a girlfriend on the side while in a common-law “marriage” to Hortense, with whom he had a son (and later a formal marriage).
Other Cézanne scholars don’t see the great painter as being particularly shy or loyal with women, noting that he frequented brothels. Whatever the truth of Cézanne’s libido, these two novels present a story of his innocent love of someone besides Hortense. This object of affection was also a model for Cézanne, so naturally a painting of her is central to the plot.
In Cézanne Quarry, art historian Pope ties her story to the famous mountain—Mont Sainte-Victoire—and quarries that Cezanne painted. It is the era in which the geology of Charles Lyell and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin are in the headlines. A British geologist, Charles Westbury, arrives to study Provenance’s rock formations. Westbury gives public talks down at the quarry. He’s also cohabiting with a mistress, Solange Vernet, a girl of mysterious background.
One day Solange is found dead in the quarry. For the local straight-arrow cop, detective Bernard Martin, there are two suspects: Westbury and Cézanne. The painter, you see, uses Solange as a model. Of course, we will find out in the end that neither of them killed her. But the prospects lend to a lively red-herring across the novel.
Solange hangs a Cézanne painting of herself in the home she shares with Westbury, which spurs some jealousy. However, Westbury and Cézanne are at odds over more than the girl.
As a geologist, Westbury values Mont Sainte-Victoir as fodder for scientific theory. Cézanne extolls it as an artistic vision. More than a few arguments arose between the geologist and the painter, and it was these heated sessions—according to witnesses—that have us thinking one of them has committed the crime of passion.
As the maid in the Westbury household tells detective Martin, Solange called the two arguing men “fools”: “I remember the last words she said before she ran to her room and locked the door. ‘Only two men could fight over a mountain.’”
Westbury will, in the end, show the greater devotion to Solange. Detective Martin finds out that the real killer is the new police inspector, Albert Frank, who actually is a former criminal who’d once had Solange (calling her a “whore”). At the quarry, Westbury resists his arrest by the corrupt Frank. The Englishman, swearing to avenge Solange, is shot dead, but not before gunning down Frank.
The story ends on this philosophical note: “Somewhere near the foot of the mountain, Cézanne was rolling up his canvas and tying his easel to a donkey, oblivious to the fact that he had won. He, not Westbury, would be left to conquer the mountain.”
This all took place in 1885, when art historians believe Cézanne had an affair just before formal marriage to Hortense. Thus, Longworth also plots her modern-day Mystery of the Lost Cézanne around a search to solve the 1885 mystery.
The scene is the city of Aix in the region of Provenance. The members of a cigar club learn that one of their members, Rene, has found a Cézanne painting—a portrait of a girl—in the building where the painter used to live (since Aix retains many of its old buildings).
The next day Rene is found dead. Oddly, a beautiful black American woman, a PhD art history expert on Cézanne from Yale, is found standing over the dead body. Her name is Rebecca Shultz. The list of suspects has begun.
In all of Longworth’s novels, set in Provenance with a side focus on French cuisine, two sleuths solve the crimes: a widowed judge named Verlaque and his mid-thirties girlfriend Marine Bonnet, a law professor. In this murder case, the killer will not be the Yale professor after all, but rather thuggish art thieves from America who had once worked for Rebecca’s wealthy parents.
As an African-American orphan, Rebecca had been adopted by a Jewish art-collecting couple in New York. They had amassed Cézanne paintings, giving Rebecca a lifelong familiarity with the painter (and thus her PhD on Cézanne). However, Rebecca feels that her academic peers resent her privileged wealth, so to prove her merit, she’s in France to make an academic breakthrough. She wants to identify the girl with whom Cézanne had his mysterious affair in 1885.
Fortunately, the painting Rene found in a ceiling panel is exactly that girl. Before long, the Aix legal eagles and Rebecca figure out the model was a young woman who worked at a bakery Cézanne patronized. Sadly, this young woman died the year after Cézanne met her. Sadder still because this is Cézanne’s only painting of a woman with a happy face and bright clothing.
And it was pure, Verlaque concludes: “Cezanne was interested in ideas; perhaps this woman shared those. Perhaps that was enough to base a relationship on; that’s all there was.” A refreshing case of French prudery, it seems.
The murder plot is more of a stretch. Back in New York, a gang of art thieves, who specialized in warehouse theft, had stolen works from the Shultz estate in the past. They caught word of Rene’s discovery (by coincidence, hearing Rene’s excitement through the wall!), and set up an elaborate ruse. On their thuggish visit to Rene, he was killed accidently during a scuffle.
We are relieved, of course, that Rebecca is not the culprit (a novel-long suspect). She will also prove herself to academia. And if that is not enough, she will quickly adopt the non-prudish French manner of love. Young Rebecca, who looks like a fashion model, ends up jumping in bed with Verlaque’s still-married father (a man in his sixties or seventies!) up in swinging Paris, where she thinks she’ll stay awhile.
SO YOU WANT to write a novel about Paul Cézanne, the French Postimpressionist painter. Three elements will suffice: the tale of Cézanne’s secret girlfriend, a murder, and a painting of the girl. The splendid backdrop of Provenance, the painter’s native region in the south of France, will also be a great plus.
These are the precise elements employed in two recent novels with Cézanne as the centerpiece. In 2009, art historian Barbara Corrado Pope gave us Cézanne’s Quarry: A Mystery. Then in 2015 we have M. L. Longworth’s The Mystery of the Lost Cézanne.
Cézanne’s life has its knowns and unknowns. One mostly-accepted belief is that he had a girlfriend on the side while in a common-law “marriage” to Hortense, with whom he had a son (and later a formal marriage).
Other Cézanne scholars don’t see the great painter as being particularly shy or loyal with women, noting that he frequented brothels. Whatever the truth of Cézanne’s libido, these two novels present a story of his innocent love of someone besides Hortense. This object of affection was also a model for Cézanne, so naturally a painting of her is central to the plot.
In Cézanne Quarry, art historian Pope ties her story to the famous mountain—Mont Sainte-Victoire—and quarries that Cezanne painted. It is the era in which the geology of Charles Lyell and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin are in the headlines. A British geologist, Charles Westbury, arrives to study Provenance’s rock formations. Westbury gives public talks down at the quarry. He’s also cohabiting with a mistress, Solange Vernet, a girl of mysterious background.
One day Solange is found dead in the quarry. For the local straight-arrow cop, detective Bernard Martin, there are two suspects: Westbury and Cézanne. The painter, you see, uses Solange as a model. Of course, we will find out in the end that neither of them killed her. But the prospects lend to a lively red-herring across the novel.
Solange hangs a Cézanne painting of herself in the home she shares with Westbury, which spurs some jealousy. However, Westbury and Cézanne are at odds over more than the girl.
As a geologist, Westbury values Mont Sainte-Victoir as fodder for scientific theory. Cézanne extolls it as an artistic vision. More than a few arguments arose between the geologist and the painter, and it was these heated sessions—according to witnesses—that have us thinking one of them has committed the crime of passion.
As the maid in the Westbury household tells detective Martin, Solange called the two arguing men “fools”: “I remember the last words she said before she ran to her room and locked the door. ‘Only two men could fight over a mountain.’”
Westbury will, in the end, show the greater devotion to Solange. Detective Martin finds out that the real killer is the new police inspector, Albert Frank, who actually is a former criminal who’d once had Solange (calling her a “whore”). At the quarry, Westbury resists his arrest by the corrupt Frank. The Englishman, swearing to avenge Solange, is shot dead, but not before gunning down Frank.
The story ends on this philosophical note: “Somewhere near the foot of the mountain, Cézanne was rolling up his canvas and tying his easel to a donkey, oblivious to the fact that he had won. He, not Westbury, would be left to conquer the mountain.”
This all took place in 1885, when art historians believe Cézanne had an affair just before formal marriage to Hortense. Thus, Longworth also plots her modern-day Mystery of the Lost Cézanne around a search to solve the 1885 mystery.
The scene is the city of Aix in the region of Provenance. The members of a cigar club learn that one of their members, Rene, has found a Cézanne painting—a portrait of a girl—in the building where the painter used to live (since Aix retains many of its old buildings).
The next day Rene is found dead. Oddly, a beautiful black American woman, a PhD art history expert on Cézanne from Yale, is found standing over the dead body. Her name is Rebecca Shultz. The list of suspects has begun.
In all of Longworth’s novels, set in Provenance with a side focus on French cuisine, two sleuths solve the crimes: a widowed judge named Verlaque and his mid-thirties girlfriend Marine Bonnet, a law professor. In this murder case, the killer will not be the Yale professor after all, but rather thuggish art thieves from America who had once worked for Rebecca’s wealthy parents.
As an African-American orphan, Rebecca had been adopted by a Jewish art-collecting couple in New York. They had amassed Cézanne paintings, giving Rebecca a lifelong familiarity with the painter (and thus her PhD on Cézanne). However, Rebecca feels that her academic peers resent her privileged wealth, so to prove her merit, she’s in France to make an academic breakthrough. She wants to identify the girl with whom Cézanne had his mysterious affair in 1885.
Fortunately, the painting Rene found in a ceiling panel is exactly that girl. Before long, the Aix legal eagles and Rebecca figure out the model was a young woman who worked at a bakery Cézanne patronized. Sadly, this young woman died the year after Cézanne met her. Sadder still because this is Cézanne’s only painting of a woman with a happy face and bright clothing.
And it was pure, Verlaque concludes: “Cezanne was interested in ideas; perhaps this woman shared those. Perhaps that was enough to base a relationship on; that’s all there was.” A refreshing case of French prudery, it seems.
The murder plot is more of a stretch. Back in New York, a gang of art thieves, who specialized in warehouse theft, had stolen works from the Shultz estate in the past. They caught word of Rene’s discovery (by coincidence, hearing Rene’s excitement through the wall!), and set up an elaborate ruse. On their thuggish visit to Rene, he was killed accidently during a scuffle.
We are relieved, of course, that Rebecca is not the culprit (a novel-long suspect). She will also prove herself to academia. And if that is not enough, she will quickly adopt the non-prudish French manner of love. Young Rebecca, who looks like a fashion model, ends up jumping in bed with Verlaque’s still-married father (a man in his sixties or seventies!) up in swinging Paris, where she thinks she’ll stay awhile.
April 7, 2016
Australia’s Prize-Winning Carey Pens a ‘Love Story’ on Art Forgery (no. 39)
A Painter and a Crooked Dealer Differ on Dollar Value of Art
IN THESE POSTMODERN times, so-called, a novel about art forgery and theft must have more than one layer. It must have some distorting mirrors thrown into the plot, forcing the reader to ask, “What is real and what is unreal?”
Before the arrival of “postmodern” literature, a forgery-and-theft story usually had a straight-line shot. For instance, a likable crook outsmarts the establishment and gets away with the painting. Or, as an alternative, a likeable inspector tenaciously tracks down the crook. Either will do, just so long as there’s a nice, surprising twist in the end.
The approach is quite different in the highly-praised caper novel Theft: A Love Story (2006), by Australian author Peter Carey. The novel creates a world of illusion about a painting’s worth. The story is also narrated by two voices, that of two brothers. One of them is mentally unreliable, a kind of idiot savant (whose broken speech is impressionistic, not linear).
Within this creative, layered approach, Carey (a two-time Booker Award winner) has packaged a story about a forged and stolen painting.
Reviewers have noted that a key line in Theft is: “How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?” In postmodern terms, the translation is: Since anything is worth only what people say it’s worth, then a fake work of art can be worth as much as the real thing. (As we’ve been told, “postmodern” means that subjective judgments create human reality).
So, on to the postmodern plot.
In Theft, Australian artist Michael “Butcher” Boone gets mixed up with a young, beautiful, and professional art crook. She is Marlene Leibovitz, who is married to the son of the late famous painter Jacques Leibovitz. Having worked in the dark side of the art world, Marlene knows that once forgeries are authenticated, they essentially become “authentic.” After that they demand the price of a masterpiece.
By contrast, the big, lumbering Boone is a practicing artist who struggles with painting as it really is. If it’s not good, he believes, it won’t sell. He knows this from experience. He was once a famous artist in Australia until he lost his touch. After that, his divorced him and took his wealth.
Author Carey gingerly contrasts the two outlook held by Marlene and Boone as they nevertheless fall for each other, producing the “love story.” As the feme fatal, Marlene capitalizes on his naivety and need for praise to pull off a few theft-and-forgery schemes she has in the making. And through it all, Boone does love her (though in the end he leaves her).
Marlene appears on Boone’s doorstep one rainy night. As it happens, a valuable painting in a neighbor’s upscale home was stolen at about the same time. Later, the local detective questions both Boone and Marlene.
Unbeknownst to anyone, Marlene has a history. To Boone, she claims to be an American. However, as a teenager in her native Australia, she was a delinquent, nay, an arsonist (she burned down a local school). As an adult, she has married Olivier Leibovitz, which is her entre to the world of famous artists and the art market. By the time she shows up at Boone’s house, she has left Olivier, who in his wealthy has become a Manhattan drug addict who loves and hates her.
We learn eventually that Marlene stole the neighbor’s painting. It was a painting said to be done by Olivier’s father (her father-in-law), and it had sold at auction for millions. However, it was really an unfinished painting, a kind of fake, touched up much later by Leibovitz’s last wife.
Therefore, who can say whether it is an authentic Leibovitz? The answer: Marlene has that legal power. Married into the Leibovitz family, she inherited the power of “droit moral,” giving her legal standing to say whether any painting that Leibovitz left behind is authentic or not. Under this cover, she has marketed forgeries, one of which is the painting she stole from the house next to Boone. The painting was about to be expert-tested for a second sale, and Marlene would lose money when it was declared a fake. So she made it disappear.
After Boone falls in love with Marlene, she persuades him and his mentally slow brother, Hugh, to go to New York with her. Hugh is always telling the other half of the story, portrayed as Boone’s “damaged, 220-pound, brother.” In New York, Marlene—slight, blonde, and manipulative—persuades Boone to fake a Leibovitz painting that she can authenticate and sell.
Unfortunately, in that same city her estranged husband Olivier is ready to blow the whistle on her. Hugh, a kind but mentally-off observer, watches these intrigues and ends up with a misunderstanding. From Marlene, he gets the impression that Olivier is making her sad, having “caused Marlene to weep, deep in the middle of the night, a human lost in outer space or inside a plastic bag, gulping for air, their GOOD NAME vacuumed from them.”
So Hugh kills Olivier, apparently by accident. (Think of the novel Of Mice and Men, in which big and slow Lennie Small wants to quiet the girl, but suffocates her).
Whether or not Marlene knew that Hugh would kill Olivier, removing him as a threat, Boone concludes that she probably had used his brother for her dirty deed. In no time, Boone packs up. He and Hugh head back to their glum life in rural Australia. No longer a wealthy artists, Boone returns to mowing lawns for a living.
But love of a postmodern sort prevails in the end.
Marlene has continued to take the art market by storm, and not only with her control of the Jacques Leiboviz legacy. She persuades a Japanese collector to purchase some of Boone’s once-out-of-fashion paintings. The rest of the art market takes notice. This resurrects his career, raising the value of anything bearing his name. These maneuvers are Marlene’s love letter to Boone, even if he still feels ultimately burned by her wicked ways.
The final twist arrives: Marlene persuades a prominent gallery in Germany to buy two Boone paintings. As the artist, he is invited to visit, and in the same gallery show he sees the painting he’d forged back in New York, a supposed work by Jacques Leibovitz.
Marlene has obviously been busy since the split up. Boone’s last words are the ones he’d said a few times already in the novel: “After all, how can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea what it’s worth?”
IN THESE POSTMODERN times, so-called, a novel about art forgery and theft must have more than one layer. It must have some distorting mirrors thrown into the plot, forcing the reader to ask, “What is real and what is unreal?”
Before the arrival of “postmodern” literature, a forgery-and-theft story usually had a straight-line shot. For instance, a likable crook outsmarts the establishment and gets away with the painting. Or, as an alternative, a likeable inspector tenaciously tracks down the crook. Either will do, just so long as there’s a nice, surprising twist in the end.
The approach is quite different in the highly-praised caper novel Theft: A Love Story (2006), by Australian author Peter Carey. The novel creates a world of illusion about a painting’s worth. The story is also narrated by two voices, that of two brothers. One of them is mentally unreliable, a kind of idiot savant (whose broken speech is impressionistic, not linear).
Within this creative, layered approach, Carey (a two-time Booker Award winner) has packaged a story about a forged and stolen painting.
Reviewers have noted that a key line in Theft is: “How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?” In postmodern terms, the translation is: Since anything is worth only what people say it’s worth, then a fake work of art can be worth as much as the real thing. (As we’ve been told, “postmodern” means that subjective judgments create human reality).
So, on to the postmodern plot.
In Theft, Australian artist Michael “Butcher” Boone gets mixed up with a young, beautiful, and professional art crook. She is Marlene Leibovitz, who is married to the son of the late famous painter Jacques Leibovitz. Having worked in the dark side of the art world, Marlene knows that once forgeries are authenticated, they essentially become “authentic.” After that they demand the price of a masterpiece.
By contrast, the big, lumbering Boone is a practicing artist who struggles with painting as it really is. If it’s not good, he believes, it won’t sell. He knows this from experience. He was once a famous artist in Australia until he lost his touch. After that, his divorced him and took his wealth.
Author Carey gingerly contrasts the two outlook held by Marlene and Boone as they nevertheless fall for each other, producing the “love story.” As the feme fatal, Marlene capitalizes on his naivety and need for praise to pull off a few theft-and-forgery schemes she has in the making. And through it all, Boone does love her (though in the end he leaves her).
Marlene appears on Boone’s doorstep one rainy night. As it happens, a valuable painting in a neighbor’s upscale home was stolen at about the same time. Later, the local detective questions both Boone and Marlene.
Unbeknownst to anyone, Marlene has a history. To Boone, she claims to be an American. However, as a teenager in her native Australia, she was a delinquent, nay, an arsonist (she burned down a local school). As an adult, she has married Olivier Leibovitz, which is her entre to the world of famous artists and the art market. By the time she shows up at Boone’s house, she has left Olivier, who in his wealthy has become a Manhattan drug addict who loves and hates her.
We learn eventually that Marlene stole the neighbor’s painting. It was a painting said to be done by Olivier’s father (her father-in-law), and it had sold at auction for millions. However, it was really an unfinished painting, a kind of fake, touched up much later by Leibovitz’s last wife.
Therefore, who can say whether it is an authentic Leibovitz? The answer: Marlene has that legal power. Married into the Leibovitz family, she inherited the power of “droit moral,” giving her legal standing to say whether any painting that Leibovitz left behind is authentic or not. Under this cover, she has marketed forgeries, one of which is the painting she stole from the house next to Boone. The painting was about to be expert-tested for a second sale, and Marlene would lose money when it was declared a fake. So she made it disappear.
After Boone falls in love with Marlene, she persuades him and his mentally slow brother, Hugh, to go to New York with her. Hugh is always telling the other half of the story, portrayed as Boone’s “damaged, 220-pound, brother.” In New York, Marlene—slight, blonde, and manipulative—persuades Boone to fake a Leibovitz painting that she can authenticate and sell.
Unfortunately, in that same city her estranged husband Olivier is ready to blow the whistle on her. Hugh, a kind but mentally-off observer, watches these intrigues and ends up with a misunderstanding. From Marlene, he gets the impression that Olivier is making her sad, having “caused Marlene to weep, deep in the middle of the night, a human lost in outer space or inside a plastic bag, gulping for air, their GOOD NAME vacuumed from them.”
So Hugh kills Olivier, apparently by accident. (Think of the novel Of Mice and Men, in which big and slow Lennie Small wants to quiet the girl, but suffocates her).
Whether or not Marlene knew that Hugh would kill Olivier, removing him as a threat, Boone concludes that she probably had used his brother for her dirty deed. In no time, Boone packs up. He and Hugh head back to their glum life in rural Australia. No longer a wealthy artists, Boone returns to mowing lawns for a living.
But love of a postmodern sort prevails in the end.
Marlene has continued to take the art market by storm, and not only with her control of the Jacques Leiboviz legacy. She persuades a Japanese collector to purchase some of Boone’s once-out-of-fashion paintings. The rest of the art market takes notice. This resurrects his career, raising the value of anything bearing his name. These maneuvers are Marlene’s love letter to Boone, even if he still feels ultimately burned by her wicked ways.
The final twist arrives: Marlene persuades a prominent gallery in Germany to buy two Boone paintings. As the artist, he is invited to visit, and in the same gallery show he sees the painting he’d forged back in New York, a supposed work by Jacques Leibovitz.
Marlene has obviously been busy since the split up. Boone’s last words are the ones he’d said a few times already in the novel: “After all, how can you know how much to pay when you have no bloody idea what it’s worth?”
April 4, 2016
The Rise of the ‘Art Mystery’ Novel (no. 38)
This Long Literary Tradition Gained Momentum since the 1970s
BEFORE KEN FOLLETT rose to fame as an author of international thrillers, he wrote an art caper. He has described it as a “lighthearted crime story.” It was titled The Modigliani Scandal (1976) and it suggests that the seventies was a kind of curtain-raiser for mystery writers putting art and artists into their plots.
The tradition goes back further in time, of course. Although Edgar Allen Poe—inventor of the detective and mystery genre—never employed the art topic, there were others in his century (Hawthorne, Melville, and James) who used portrait paintings as a pivot for psychological mysteries: The portraits forebode an ill fate for the characters.
After writing my own “art mystery,” I researched the history of novels in which artists and art are central. Of the nearly two hundred that I have found, the greatest number falls into the literary or historical fiction category.
Even so, the so-called art mystery has its venerable place. It has had two spurts in the twentieth century, beginning in the 1930s with the golden age of British detective fiction. The “queens of crime”—Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham—all produced at least once plot that involved artists and paintings as clues, victims, or culprits, with Marsh having the record (since she had studied painting in art school).
Then in the 1970s the art caper truly blossoms. Though not exactly a mystery, the 1972 novel The Eiger Sanction introduced the protagonist Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor. He also moonlighted as an assassin to earn money to buy stolen paintings. This was the satirical creation of the American writer Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker), who was spoofing the James Bond genre. Still, it was taken seriously and became a best-seller. The second Hemlock adventure, The Loo Sanction (1973), was equally satirical and goes even further in portraying the zany contemporary art world.
If Trevanian and Follett got the ball rolling in the 1970s, there are several other reasons why art mysteries began to take off. One is our increased knowledge about Nazi looting of art during WWII and the return of that art to victims. What better mystery than tracking down a masterpiece stashed in a salt mine by Hitler’s minions? Today, novels with the Nazi looting element are legion.
Another energizing factor was the boom in “contemporary art,” which is dated to the seventies (as a splinter off of “modern art”). Contemporary art is flamboyant and 1960’s-rebellious. It introduced concept art, performance art, feminist art, video art, and mixed these with the new music, urban, and drug culture. And the flamboyance was just the start.
Contemporary art began to sell for astronomical amounts of money at auctions. (All the “old masters” art was already bought up around the world). This stunning rise in value led to a surge in art crime: forgery of modern art, theft, and art-market manipulation. What a goldmine for crime fiction! The result has been ever-new variations on the forgery and theft theme, usually with a murder opening the story.
Then came the real-life serial killers. They reached newspaper headlines and soon became a favorite topic for novelists. Why not an artist as a serial killer? Only a deranged painter, for example, could leave clues in the form of corpses posed like famous works of art.
Art forgery, of course, is not really new. It goes back to the Renaissance. The same goes with art theft. Looting paintings was a specialty of Napoleon well before Hitler. For today’s novelists, however, a much more recent round of historical cases has offered good material for plots and technical descriptions.
More than a few novelists have drawn on the story of the Dutch artist who developed chemical techniques to forge Vermeer paintings that fooled the Nazis. We also have the struggling British painter who, in the 1980s, forged countless modern works. Since the 1970s, moreover, antiquity smuggling had prospered. Dramatic thefts hit European museums. And in 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed of several old masters, which are still missing.
In the wake of these trends, the Italians formed the world’s first “art squad.” Other countries followed, and now have a new breed of detective, the so-called “art cop.” These new art sleuths, and many of the real cases, have now been morphed into novels.
Detectives are virtually absent from historical fiction about art, as illustrated by a genre of blockbusters ranging from Irving Stone’s life of Van Gogh (Lust for Life, 1934) to Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel about Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring. There are exceptions, though. In one recent novel, the painter Cezanne is a suspect when his model is killed. Leonardo da Vinci has also been embroiled in a detective plot.
Through the 1990s, publishers and authors began to catch on. Since then, they have produced several “series” of art mysteries that feature a recurring, likable sleuth. Series novels have been published as “art historical,” “artworld,” “art lover’s,” “bodies of art,” and “art gallery” mysteries. Another half dozen go simply by the protagonist’s name: See the Chris Norgren, Joanna Stark, Tim Simpson, and Fred Taylor art mysteries, to name a few. They’re all art experts who solve crimes.
The challenge of every mystery novel is to avoid clichés, those cookie-cutter plots in which only the names and locations are changed. The clever use of art crime has become another tool to create something new, both in plot and atmosphere. Some novelists specialize in this. Others use it once and move on. And we do see some clichés emerging, as expected.
Nevertheless, if reviews of art mysteries at Amazon and Goodreads are any indication, many readers have little knowledge of the art world, and thus find that part of the novel the most revelatory. If that remains true, the art mystery genre will have a future.
(This blog was first posted at Omnimysterynews.com).
BEFORE KEN FOLLETT rose to fame as an author of international thrillers, he wrote an art caper. He has described it as a “lighthearted crime story.” It was titled The Modigliani Scandal (1976) and it suggests that the seventies was a kind of curtain-raiser for mystery writers putting art and artists into their plots.
The tradition goes back further in time, of course. Although Edgar Allen Poe—inventor of the detective and mystery genre—never employed the art topic, there were others in his century (Hawthorne, Melville, and James) who used portrait paintings as a pivot for psychological mysteries: The portraits forebode an ill fate for the characters.
After writing my own “art mystery,” I researched the history of novels in which artists and art are central. Of the nearly two hundred that I have found, the greatest number falls into the literary or historical fiction category.
Even so, the so-called art mystery has its venerable place. It has had two spurts in the twentieth century, beginning in the 1930s with the golden age of British detective fiction. The “queens of crime”—Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham—all produced at least once plot that involved artists and paintings as clues, victims, or culprits, with Marsh having the record (since she had studied painting in art school).
Then in the 1970s the art caper truly blossoms. Though not exactly a mystery, the 1972 novel The Eiger Sanction introduced the protagonist Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor. He also moonlighted as an assassin to earn money to buy stolen paintings. This was the satirical creation of the American writer Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker), who was spoofing the James Bond genre. Still, it was taken seriously and became a best-seller. The second Hemlock adventure, The Loo Sanction (1973), was equally satirical and goes even further in portraying the zany contemporary art world.
If Trevanian and Follett got the ball rolling in the 1970s, there are several other reasons why art mysteries began to take off. One is our increased knowledge about Nazi looting of art during WWII and the return of that art to victims. What better mystery than tracking down a masterpiece stashed in a salt mine by Hitler’s minions? Today, novels with the Nazi looting element are legion.
Another energizing factor was the boom in “contemporary art,” which is dated to the seventies (as a splinter off of “modern art”). Contemporary art is flamboyant and 1960’s-rebellious. It introduced concept art, performance art, feminist art, video art, and mixed these with the new music, urban, and drug culture. And the flamboyance was just the start.
Contemporary art began to sell for astronomical amounts of money at auctions. (All the “old masters” art was already bought up around the world). This stunning rise in value led to a surge in art crime: forgery of modern art, theft, and art-market manipulation. What a goldmine for crime fiction! The result has been ever-new variations on the forgery and theft theme, usually with a murder opening the story.
Then came the real-life serial killers. They reached newspaper headlines and soon became a favorite topic for novelists. Why not an artist as a serial killer? Only a deranged painter, for example, could leave clues in the form of corpses posed like famous works of art.
Art forgery, of course, is not really new. It goes back to the Renaissance. The same goes with art theft. Looting paintings was a specialty of Napoleon well before Hitler. For today’s novelists, however, a much more recent round of historical cases has offered good material for plots and technical descriptions.
More than a few novelists have drawn on the story of the Dutch artist who developed chemical techniques to forge Vermeer paintings that fooled the Nazis. We also have the struggling British painter who, in the 1980s, forged countless modern works. Since the 1970s, moreover, antiquity smuggling had prospered. Dramatic thefts hit European museums. And in 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed of several old masters, which are still missing.
In the wake of these trends, the Italians formed the world’s first “art squad.” Other countries followed, and now have a new breed of detective, the so-called “art cop.” These new art sleuths, and many of the real cases, have now been morphed into novels.
Detectives are virtually absent from historical fiction about art, as illustrated by a genre of blockbusters ranging from Irving Stone’s life of Van Gogh (Lust for Life, 1934) to Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel about Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring. There are exceptions, though. In one recent novel, the painter Cezanne is a suspect when his model is killed. Leonardo da Vinci has also been embroiled in a detective plot.
Through the 1990s, publishers and authors began to catch on. Since then, they have produced several “series” of art mysteries that feature a recurring, likable sleuth. Series novels have been published as “art historical,” “artworld,” “art lover’s,” “bodies of art,” and “art gallery” mysteries. Another half dozen go simply by the protagonist’s name: See the Chris Norgren, Joanna Stark, Tim Simpson, and Fred Taylor art mysteries, to name a few. They’re all art experts who solve crimes.
The challenge of every mystery novel is to avoid clichés, those cookie-cutter plots in which only the names and locations are changed. The clever use of art crime has become another tool to create something new, both in plot and atmosphere. Some novelists specialize in this. Others use it once and move on. And we do see some clichés emerging, as expected.
Nevertheless, if reviews of art mysteries at Amazon and Goodreads are any indication, many readers have little knowledge of the art world, and thus find that part of the novel the most revelatory. If that remains true, the art mystery genre will have a future.
(This blog was first posted at Omnimysterynews.com).
March 31, 2016
Part II: Approaches to the Fictional Biography of Artemisia (no. 37)
Vreeland’s ‘Passion’ of Artemisia Plays on Feeling and Grievance
SUSAN VREELAND HAS earned a reputation as perhaps the leading romance writer of historical art fiction, ranging in her characters across the northern Renaissance, the Italian baroque period, the French Impressionists, and more.
She came on the scene in 1999 with the sleeper bestseller The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999), published by a small Denver press. It tells a kind of romantic and tragic story surrounding the Dutch artist Vermeer and one of his paintings.
With her publishing platform secure, Vreeland moved on to a second art history novel, telling the story of the Italian baroque-period painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), the first woman to be accepted into the Florence Academy.
The novel is titled The Passion of Artemisia, (2002), and this time it came out with a major New York publishing house. It was a curtain raiser for other of Vreeland’s upmarket art historical novels to come, and in this benchmark work, Artemisia’s “passion” is a very appropriate term.
Of all the Artemisia novels (see Part I), Vreeland’s is by far the best known and the most commercially successful. In Passion of Artemisia, Vreeland’s graceful prose pulls out all the stops when it comes to a woman’s longings, feelings, resolves and resentments. Of course, Artemisia—as all of her biographers have detailed—had some very legitimate things to complain about, despite her otherwise successful and interesting life (at least compared to virtually all other women in the seventeenth century).
The first is her rape at age eighteen, made famous now by a rape trial that was documented in historical records. Vreeland opens her story here. She presents the trial in its raw gynecologic detail. Not only are the church officials the epitome of evil, but we also find Artemisia passionately loathing her father, a betrayer. He sued the rapist over a stolen painting, and this had dragged Artemisia into a humiliating public spectacle.
The passion shows up in a few other strong themes. A central one, perhaps second only to the rape, is Artemisia’s artistic specialty—painting a violent biblical scene in which a wronged woman cuts off the head of the man. This is the story of Judith, and in several such head-cutting oil paintings, Artemisia both innovates in composition and, as this novel suggests, gets vicarious revenge against such wanton men.
Vreeland’s novel also focuses on Artemisia’s additional quality as a painter: she does nude females. To paint biblical and mythological stories that required naked women, Artemisia could use a female model, whereas (officially, at least), male guild artists and students could use only male nudes, otherwise it was said to be a scandal.
In painting women, Artemisia made some obvious changes in the expressions on their faces. For narrative effect, Vreeland reads the painter’s thoughts into some of the works, suggesting how Artemisia had revealed a true female psychology in facial expressions and bodily gestures (versus the idealized, passive looks used by male painters).
By the subject matter and the psychology, Artemisia introduces a woman’s point of view into Western art, the novel implies. If that’s not clear, Artemisia states it plainly to her father. Society can change its view on women, she tells him: “Things will change, father, they must, and art can help create the change.”
Artemisia’s passions, and the training she received from her father, would gradually put her in significant company. For a start, her husband—with whom we are treated to a few sex scenes—takes her to Florence, away from Rome, with its bad memories. In Florence, she becomes friends with the nephew of Michelangelo, gains introduction to the house of de Medici (for whom she paints), and becomes a close friend of no less than Galileo. They are both trying to drag the medieval world into the modern one, as this story goes.
Still, the most passionate side of Artemisia stems from the sense of injustice she feels toward her father. It is also shown in her devotion to her daughter, raising her to be a painter and an independent woman. However, the daughter does not agree; she doesn’t like to paint, and would rather marry a nobleman. Indeed, Artemisia chastises her daughter for not “feeling” passion (“white hot passion”), and not feeling utter indignation over the “pain and humiliation” that her mother’s life has undergone (again, focused on the rape trial).
In one of her rare critical moments (of herself) Artemisia admits that she is actually a lot like her father. He has sacrifice her for his art, and looking back, she has also left her husband and neglected her daughter for her art. “We’ve have both chosen art over our daughters,” Artemisia confesses.
In this novel, Vreeland is looking for emotional drama, a strong sense of grievance, distinctly good people and bad people—and finally, a symmetrical plot. For example, the real Artemisia had at least four children, some of them boys. In The Passion of Artemisia, Vreeland simplifies it down to one daughter, an only child, so that a mother-daughter dialogue can stitch across the novel uninterrupted.
Also symmetrical, Artemisia ends up in London with her father (true to history) and they reconcile (an unknown in history). Art is pain. Life is like that, and older and wiser Artemisia realizes. At least her father taught her to see, to use her imagination, and to paint.
The number of Artemisia novels—three so far—pales next to the hundreds of graduate student papers done on the most notable female artist of Renaissance Italy. As noted in Part I, literary critic Susan Sontag spoke of the first Artemisia novel (Artemisia, 1947, by Anna Banti), as solace for aggrieved women, both readers and Banti herself. As the author, Banti could, by “assuming the full burden of sympathy, console and fortify herself,” Sontag says. “And [console] the reader—especially the woman reader.” One virtue of all Artemisia novels, to be sure.
SUSAN VREELAND HAS earned a reputation as perhaps the leading romance writer of historical art fiction, ranging in her characters across the northern Renaissance, the Italian baroque period, the French Impressionists, and more.
She came on the scene in 1999 with the sleeper bestseller The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999), published by a small Denver press. It tells a kind of romantic and tragic story surrounding the Dutch artist Vermeer and one of his paintings.
With her publishing platform secure, Vreeland moved on to a second art history novel, telling the story of the Italian baroque-period painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), the first woman to be accepted into the Florence Academy.
The novel is titled The Passion of Artemisia, (2002), and this time it came out with a major New York publishing house. It was a curtain raiser for other of Vreeland’s upmarket art historical novels to come, and in this benchmark work, Artemisia’s “passion” is a very appropriate term.
Of all the Artemisia novels (see Part I), Vreeland’s is by far the best known and the most commercially successful. In Passion of Artemisia, Vreeland’s graceful prose pulls out all the stops when it comes to a woman’s longings, feelings, resolves and resentments. Of course, Artemisia—as all of her biographers have detailed—had some very legitimate things to complain about, despite her otherwise successful and interesting life (at least compared to virtually all other women in the seventeenth century).
The first is her rape at age eighteen, made famous now by a rape trial that was documented in historical records. Vreeland opens her story here. She presents the trial in its raw gynecologic detail. Not only are the church officials the epitome of evil, but we also find Artemisia passionately loathing her father, a betrayer. He sued the rapist over a stolen painting, and this had dragged Artemisia into a humiliating public spectacle.
The passion shows up in a few other strong themes. A central one, perhaps second only to the rape, is Artemisia’s artistic specialty—painting a violent biblical scene in which a wronged woman cuts off the head of the man. This is the story of Judith, and in several such head-cutting oil paintings, Artemisia both innovates in composition and, as this novel suggests, gets vicarious revenge against such wanton men.
Vreeland’s novel also focuses on Artemisia’s additional quality as a painter: she does nude females. To paint biblical and mythological stories that required naked women, Artemisia could use a female model, whereas (officially, at least), male guild artists and students could use only male nudes, otherwise it was said to be a scandal.
In painting women, Artemisia made some obvious changes in the expressions on their faces. For narrative effect, Vreeland reads the painter’s thoughts into some of the works, suggesting how Artemisia had revealed a true female psychology in facial expressions and bodily gestures (versus the idealized, passive looks used by male painters).
By the subject matter and the psychology, Artemisia introduces a woman’s point of view into Western art, the novel implies. If that’s not clear, Artemisia states it plainly to her father. Society can change its view on women, she tells him: “Things will change, father, they must, and art can help create the change.”
Artemisia’s passions, and the training she received from her father, would gradually put her in significant company. For a start, her husband—with whom we are treated to a few sex scenes—takes her to Florence, away from Rome, with its bad memories. In Florence, she becomes friends with the nephew of Michelangelo, gains introduction to the house of de Medici (for whom she paints), and becomes a close friend of no less than Galileo. They are both trying to drag the medieval world into the modern one, as this story goes.
Still, the most passionate side of Artemisia stems from the sense of injustice she feels toward her father. It is also shown in her devotion to her daughter, raising her to be a painter and an independent woman. However, the daughter does not agree; she doesn’t like to paint, and would rather marry a nobleman. Indeed, Artemisia chastises her daughter for not “feeling” passion (“white hot passion”), and not feeling utter indignation over the “pain and humiliation” that her mother’s life has undergone (again, focused on the rape trial).
In one of her rare critical moments (of herself) Artemisia admits that she is actually a lot like her father. He has sacrifice her for his art, and looking back, she has also left her husband and neglected her daughter for her art. “We’ve have both chosen art over our daughters,” Artemisia confesses.
In this novel, Vreeland is looking for emotional drama, a strong sense of grievance, distinctly good people and bad people—and finally, a symmetrical plot. For example, the real Artemisia had at least four children, some of them boys. In The Passion of Artemisia, Vreeland simplifies it down to one daughter, an only child, so that a mother-daughter dialogue can stitch across the novel uninterrupted.
Also symmetrical, Artemisia ends up in London with her father (true to history) and they reconcile (an unknown in history). Art is pain. Life is like that, and older and wiser Artemisia realizes. At least her father taught her to see, to use her imagination, and to paint.
The number of Artemisia novels—three so far—pales next to the hundreds of graduate student papers done on the most notable female artist of Renaissance Italy. As noted in Part I, literary critic Susan Sontag spoke of the first Artemisia novel (Artemisia, 1947, by Anna Banti), as solace for aggrieved women, both readers and Banti herself. As the author, Banti could, by “assuming the full burden of sympathy, console and fortify herself,” Sontag says. “And [console] the reader—especially the woman reader.” One virtue of all Artemisia novels, to be sure.
March 28, 2016
Part I: Approaches to the Fictional Biography of Artemisia (no. 36)
Female Baroque Artist Seen as Inspiration for Modern Women
THE ITALIAN PAINTER Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) has become a modern heroine of sorts, the topic of novels, countless academic papers, and a documentary. Artemisia, who painted in the baroque style, has also prompted the literary critic Susan Sontag to reflect on the different ways that modern fiction writers handle historical biography.
In an essay and book review about Artemisia, Sontag said fictional treatments of the past typically take three approaches: the historical novel, the biographical novel, and the fictionalized biography.
While the three distinctions are subtle (or even non-existent), Sontag’s point is that the first novel about the painter—a novel titled Artemisia (1947) and written by the Italian art critic Anna Banti—followed none of the three.
Writing in Italy during WWII, Banti had at first completed a kind of documentary novel about Artemisia by 1945. Then the manuscript was lost in her native city of Florence during the final battle that ousted the Germans. Naturally distraught, Banti re-wrote the novel, but in an entirely different way. It now is a conversation between her and Artemisia. They share their mutual hardships in a kind of dialogue, what Sontag calls a story “about a woman of great accomplishment [Banti] haunted by another woman of great accomplishment [Artemisia].”
Besides Artemisia’s milestone achievements—the first woman accepted in the Florence Academy, a friend of Galileo, and a painter of masterworks in Rome, Florence, Naples, and London—she is remembered mostly for one great injustice. At age eighteen, she was raped by a man who worked with her father. Her father, also a noted baroque painter, followed Caravaggio and taught his daughter those techniques of dramatic dark and light (known as chiaroscuro).
The father took the rapist to trial (actually, over a stolen painting), and the trial exposed Artemisia to great public humiliation. Having lost her mother, Artemisia had a life-long, and problematic, relationship to her father as both only parent and art mentor. In fictional treatments, Artemisia usually hates him for his allowing the trial. Still, she must also love him for being her blood and her teacher. He gave her a path to professional accomplishment.
As a literary critic, Sontag is an uber-feminist, of course. Thus, for her money, both Banti and Artemisia had become too dependent on a male figure. For Banti, the dependence was on her husband, the famous art historian Roberto Longhi (who, in fact, wrote the first historical essay on Artemisia, bringing her obscure past to the attention of the scholarly art world). In Artemisia’s case, Sontag says she was probably too dependent on her father, and thus it shows up in fictional treatments as well.
For instance, in the Banti novel, Sontag notes, the most thrilling part is about Artemisia making the daunting trip to London to join her father. By comparison, the Banti novel has Artemisia narrating her rape simply by telling the sad tale to Banti in conversation, then resting her head on the author’s shoulder. In short, Sontag does not find either woman modern enough.
Banti, writing elsewhere, has said that her novel hoped to show Artemisia’s quest to “to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command.” Artimesia is the classic proud and indignant woman. And yet Banti’s novel is not built on the “women’s rage and women’s victimization” (Sontag's phrase) that typifies modern feminist literature. Sontag mildly regrets this, since the historical Artemisia has such potential for evoking those particular emotions.
Many years after Banti’s effort, two more novels have told Artemisia’s story. Neither has the experimental tone of Banti’s work, putting both of them more clearly in Sontag’s categories for historical biography. The two novels are: Artemisia (1998) by the French author Alexandra Lapierre and The Passion of Artemisia (2002) by the American author Susan Vreeland. (Vreeland’s novel will be looked at more closely in Part II).
Both the Lapierre and Vreeland novels have had to ask: Should the novel stay with the facts, dull as they may be sometimes? Should new significant facts be invented to dramatize or smooth the narrative? And, finally, should the story have an agenda—picking heroes and villains, that is—or look for a more complex story in the factual evidence?
To simplify, the French author Lapierre sticks with facts and adds ambiguity in judging the characters. In contrast, Vreeland invents facts for dramatic effect and presents her tale as a morality play with clear victims and oppressors.
The French author Lapierre, whose Artemisia novel was translated into English in 2002, began with a purely factual agenda. She wanted to write a nonfiction biography of Artemisia, putting the painter and her painter-father, Orazio, “back into the historical, religious and social contexts of the various worlds that they had inhabited.” But to do so, she decided, would finally require her to “fictionalize elements of the story.” The sixty pages of academic notes in the back of the novel testify to its factual accuracy, at least in explaining why Lapierre “adopted certain theories and why I made the choices I did.”
The “novel” is impressive for it details, organizing its chronology of events in forty-one sections. These bear titles ranging from “The First Five Months After the Rape,” to “Artemisia’s Bedroom,” “Travelling between Rome and Florence,” “Florence in Galileo’s Day,” and “The Queen’s House in Greenwich,” where Artemisia painted ceiling panels with her father.
By the time Lapierre wrote her novel, already “there were drawers full of doctoral theses on Artemisia Gentileschi in universities across the United States.” Yet the baroque painter did not fully enter upmarket commercial fiction until Vreeland seized on the topic—to be discussed next in Part II.
THE ITALIAN PAINTER Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656) has become a modern heroine of sorts, the topic of novels, countless academic papers, and a documentary. Artemisia, who painted in the baroque style, has also prompted the literary critic Susan Sontag to reflect on the different ways that modern fiction writers handle historical biography.
In an essay and book review about Artemisia, Sontag said fictional treatments of the past typically take three approaches: the historical novel, the biographical novel, and the fictionalized biography.
While the three distinctions are subtle (or even non-existent), Sontag’s point is that the first novel about the painter—a novel titled Artemisia (1947) and written by the Italian art critic Anna Banti—followed none of the three.
Writing in Italy during WWII, Banti had at first completed a kind of documentary novel about Artemisia by 1945. Then the manuscript was lost in her native city of Florence during the final battle that ousted the Germans. Naturally distraught, Banti re-wrote the novel, but in an entirely different way. It now is a conversation between her and Artemisia. They share their mutual hardships in a kind of dialogue, what Sontag calls a story “about a woman of great accomplishment [Banti] haunted by another woman of great accomplishment [Artemisia].”
Besides Artemisia’s milestone achievements—the first woman accepted in the Florence Academy, a friend of Galileo, and a painter of masterworks in Rome, Florence, Naples, and London—she is remembered mostly for one great injustice. At age eighteen, she was raped by a man who worked with her father. Her father, also a noted baroque painter, followed Caravaggio and taught his daughter those techniques of dramatic dark and light (known as chiaroscuro).
The father took the rapist to trial (actually, over a stolen painting), and the trial exposed Artemisia to great public humiliation. Having lost her mother, Artemisia had a life-long, and problematic, relationship to her father as both only parent and art mentor. In fictional treatments, Artemisia usually hates him for his allowing the trial. Still, she must also love him for being her blood and her teacher. He gave her a path to professional accomplishment.
As a literary critic, Sontag is an uber-feminist, of course. Thus, for her money, both Banti and Artemisia had become too dependent on a male figure. For Banti, the dependence was on her husband, the famous art historian Roberto Longhi (who, in fact, wrote the first historical essay on Artemisia, bringing her obscure past to the attention of the scholarly art world). In Artemisia’s case, Sontag says she was probably too dependent on her father, and thus it shows up in fictional treatments as well.
For instance, in the Banti novel, Sontag notes, the most thrilling part is about Artemisia making the daunting trip to London to join her father. By comparison, the Banti novel has Artemisia narrating her rape simply by telling the sad tale to Banti in conversation, then resting her head on the author’s shoulder. In short, Sontag does not find either woman modern enough.
Banti, writing elsewhere, has said that her novel hoped to show Artemisia’s quest to “to be justified, to be avenged, to be in command.” Artimesia is the classic proud and indignant woman. And yet Banti’s novel is not built on the “women’s rage and women’s victimization” (Sontag's phrase) that typifies modern feminist literature. Sontag mildly regrets this, since the historical Artemisia has such potential for evoking those particular emotions.
Many years after Banti’s effort, two more novels have told Artemisia’s story. Neither has the experimental tone of Banti’s work, putting both of them more clearly in Sontag’s categories for historical biography. The two novels are: Artemisia (1998) by the French author Alexandra Lapierre and The Passion of Artemisia (2002) by the American author Susan Vreeland. (Vreeland’s novel will be looked at more closely in Part II).
Both the Lapierre and Vreeland novels have had to ask: Should the novel stay with the facts, dull as they may be sometimes? Should new significant facts be invented to dramatize or smooth the narrative? And, finally, should the story have an agenda—picking heroes and villains, that is—or look for a more complex story in the factual evidence?
To simplify, the French author Lapierre sticks with facts and adds ambiguity in judging the characters. In contrast, Vreeland invents facts for dramatic effect and presents her tale as a morality play with clear victims and oppressors.
The French author Lapierre, whose Artemisia novel was translated into English in 2002, began with a purely factual agenda. She wanted to write a nonfiction biography of Artemisia, putting the painter and her painter-father, Orazio, “back into the historical, religious and social contexts of the various worlds that they had inhabited.” But to do so, she decided, would finally require her to “fictionalize elements of the story.” The sixty pages of academic notes in the back of the novel testify to its factual accuracy, at least in explaining why Lapierre “adopted certain theories and why I made the choices I did.”
The “novel” is impressive for it details, organizing its chronology of events in forty-one sections. These bear titles ranging from “The First Five Months After the Rape,” to “Artemisia’s Bedroom,” “Travelling between Rome and Florence,” “Florence in Galileo’s Day,” and “The Queen’s House in Greenwich,” where Artemisia painted ceiling panels with her father.
By the time Lapierre wrote her novel, already “there were drawers full of doctoral theses on Artemisia Gentileschi in universities across the United States.” Yet the baroque painter did not fully enter upmarket commercial fiction until Vreeland seized on the topic—to be discussed next in Part II.
March 24, 2016
Standing in the Shoes of Velasquez by Way of Hallucination (no. 35)
Gruber’s Art Novel Explores Time Travel in the Drug-Addled Mind
THE CENTRAL ART history character in Michael Gruber’s contemporary novel, The Forgery of Venus (2008), is the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez. But there’s also some spirit of Timothy Leary, Ken Keasy, and Hunter S. Thompson thrown in as well.
All three were 1960s denizens of LSD and peyote use, and as a novel, Forgery of Venus harks back to that mind-altering milieu. In this work of fiction, a strong dose of psychotropic drugs allows young protagonist Chaz Wilmot to hallucinate that he is the Spanish painter of old. As Chaz tells us, “In having [drug-induced] fantasies about being Velázquez, I was still being who I was, if you get what I'm saying.” In other words, Chaz is saying he is a traditional painter, as was Velázquez.
Chaz Wilmot is subjected to his hallucinations off and on for several months, and it is this psychological time shifting that gives the novel its unique feel. The hallucinogenic experience also becomes a fulcrum for the plot: Chaz ends up forging a historic Velázquez painting, the (fictional) Alba Venus, something he could not have done without the phantasms.
The novel opens with Chaz's old college friend telling us what has happened. Chaz has become a New York artist. When the discovery of a "missing" Velázquez painting makes headlines, Chaz tells his friend that it was he, in fact, who had painted the work. Chaz gives him a set of digital audio files with his account of how all of this came to be. The audio narration is essentially the rest of the novel.
Chaz has stumbled into his adventure by way of his three college friends, all alumni of Columbia University. One has become an art dealer. Another is a medical researcher. The friend that Chaz gives the audio records to has become a lawyer, and thus a trusted and objective raconteur.
Chaz has become a realistic painter, but with a history hanging over him. His father was a famous illustrator, but they never got along. Extremely talented, Chaz has also been a drug addict. He’s been in rehab twice and is on a second marriage. His wife, Lottie, is loyal and his son has a life-threatening lung ailment.
As a traditionalist painter—with an “incredible facility with styles of the past”—Chaz is also being sidelined by the avant-garde art scene in New York. So he’s looking for alternatives. For a start, his medical friend invites him to volunteer to participate in a clinical experiment that attempts to understand human creativity. He is given doses of Salvinorin A, a true-to-life psychotropic (like mescaline, for example) found in a plant (Salvia divinorum) in Mexico and used by shamans for centuries.
What Chaz does not realized, however, is that the clinicians have implanted a long-term dose of Salvinorin under his skin. As the drug seeps into his system over several months, Chaz is subjected to several sudden experiences of time travel, both in New York City and Europe. Later, someone will diagnose this as “an unprecedented reaction to Salvanorin combined with amnesia, also drug related.” When Chaz discusses it with confidants, it's described as “sense memories” of the past or a “vivid dream.”
All the while, the reader may think Chaz is going crazy—as Chaz does at times—or that this story may be some kind of paranormal tale. Or, is this a time-travel fantasy, a kind of sci-fi novel? No to all three, however.
The story is exploring the drugged imagination of an artist. We see Chaz under the influence in New York and later in Venice, where he has gone to work on restoring historical paintings (and where he slowly gets into the old-masters forgery business). In Venice he imagines himself being Velázquez and paints just as the old master would have. He also has a love affair with the Spanish painter’s model of four centuries ago.
The trick in such a plot is to explain how Chaz’s physical body can operated in the real world as he hallucinates, and how people around him over these periods don’t notice that he’s in a hallucinatory state.
A skilled novelist, Gruber achieves this well enough by essentially avoiding too much explanation, gingerly introducing a few episodes where Chaz is going around knocking on doors and visiting places that are in the future. The people he meets simply think he’s going a little crazy. After all, Chaz is known for his history of drug use. And, of course, at one point in New York the men in white coats take him to Bellevue mental hospital for a day or two.
While we are in New York with Chaz, author Gruber paints the hip art scene in thick strokes. To escape this stressful environment, Chaz accepts his art dealer friend’s invitation to do the restoration work in Venice. There, Chaz meets a veteran art crook, a German named Krebs, and is lured into a wider forgery occupation. Through the Krebs episode we learn the history of modern art looting and forgery.
Gruber has had quite a career before becoming a successful novelist. He traveled in the 1960s with rock groups (druggies, no doubt), served as an Army medic, and then became a marine biologist with a PhD. In other words, he knows the biological foundations for mind-bending drugs, keeping the novel within the bounds of plausibility.
The story finally comes around to Chaz’s wife and his art dealer friend. They are in a conspiracy of sorts. The art dealer gave Chaz the Krebs connection, and the wife encourage him to do the forgeries, since it would allow him to earn the money needed for their son’s medical treatment. She also wants Chaz to fulfill his old-masters art potential, as he certainly did by inventing a Velázquez painting that fooled world experts.
Through his hallucinatory time travel, Chaz produced the Alba Venus, which the world now believes is a “lost” painting, presently found. How will history ever know that it’s really not a lost Velasquez, but a time-travel forgery? Chaz put his wife’s birth mark on Venus’s body, that’s how.
The lawyer-friend has the final say at the end of the novel. He watches as the Venus sells on the auction block in Manhattan. He has no reason to doubt the story in the digital files, and he is mulling the prospect of writing the book.
THE CENTRAL ART history character in Michael Gruber’s contemporary novel, The Forgery of Venus (2008), is the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez. But there’s also some spirit of Timothy Leary, Ken Keasy, and Hunter S. Thompson thrown in as well.
All three were 1960s denizens of LSD and peyote use, and as a novel, Forgery of Venus harks back to that mind-altering milieu. In this work of fiction, a strong dose of psychotropic drugs allows young protagonist Chaz Wilmot to hallucinate that he is the Spanish painter of old. As Chaz tells us, “In having [drug-induced] fantasies about being Velázquez, I was still being who I was, if you get what I'm saying.” In other words, Chaz is saying he is a traditional painter, as was Velázquez.
Chaz Wilmot is subjected to his hallucinations off and on for several months, and it is this psychological time shifting that gives the novel its unique feel. The hallucinogenic experience also becomes a fulcrum for the plot: Chaz ends up forging a historic Velázquez painting, the (fictional) Alba Venus, something he could not have done without the phantasms.
The novel opens with Chaz's old college friend telling us what has happened. Chaz has become a New York artist. When the discovery of a "missing" Velázquez painting makes headlines, Chaz tells his friend that it was he, in fact, who had painted the work. Chaz gives him a set of digital audio files with his account of how all of this came to be. The audio narration is essentially the rest of the novel.
Chaz has stumbled into his adventure by way of his three college friends, all alumni of Columbia University. One has become an art dealer. Another is a medical researcher. The friend that Chaz gives the audio records to has become a lawyer, and thus a trusted and objective raconteur.
Chaz has become a realistic painter, but with a history hanging over him. His father was a famous illustrator, but they never got along. Extremely talented, Chaz has also been a drug addict. He’s been in rehab twice and is on a second marriage. His wife, Lottie, is loyal and his son has a life-threatening lung ailment.
As a traditionalist painter—with an “incredible facility with styles of the past”—Chaz is also being sidelined by the avant-garde art scene in New York. So he’s looking for alternatives. For a start, his medical friend invites him to volunteer to participate in a clinical experiment that attempts to understand human creativity. He is given doses of Salvinorin A, a true-to-life psychotropic (like mescaline, for example) found in a plant (Salvia divinorum) in Mexico and used by shamans for centuries.
What Chaz does not realized, however, is that the clinicians have implanted a long-term dose of Salvinorin under his skin. As the drug seeps into his system over several months, Chaz is subjected to several sudden experiences of time travel, both in New York City and Europe. Later, someone will diagnose this as “an unprecedented reaction to Salvanorin combined with amnesia, also drug related.” When Chaz discusses it with confidants, it's described as “sense memories” of the past or a “vivid dream.”
All the while, the reader may think Chaz is going crazy—as Chaz does at times—or that this story may be some kind of paranormal tale. Or, is this a time-travel fantasy, a kind of sci-fi novel? No to all three, however.
The story is exploring the drugged imagination of an artist. We see Chaz under the influence in New York and later in Venice, where he has gone to work on restoring historical paintings (and where he slowly gets into the old-masters forgery business). In Venice he imagines himself being Velázquez and paints just as the old master would have. He also has a love affair with the Spanish painter’s model of four centuries ago.
The trick in such a plot is to explain how Chaz’s physical body can operated in the real world as he hallucinates, and how people around him over these periods don’t notice that he’s in a hallucinatory state.
A skilled novelist, Gruber achieves this well enough by essentially avoiding too much explanation, gingerly introducing a few episodes where Chaz is going around knocking on doors and visiting places that are in the future. The people he meets simply think he’s going a little crazy. After all, Chaz is known for his history of drug use. And, of course, at one point in New York the men in white coats take him to Bellevue mental hospital for a day or two.
While we are in New York with Chaz, author Gruber paints the hip art scene in thick strokes. To escape this stressful environment, Chaz accepts his art dealer friend’s invitation to do the restoration work in Venice. There, Chaz meets a veteran art crook, a German named Krebs, and is lured into a wider forgery occupation. Through the Krebs episode we learn the history of modern art looting and forgery.
Gruber has had quite a career before becoming a successful novelist. He traveled in the 1960s with rock groups (druggies, no doubt), served as an Army medic, and then became a marine biologist with a PhD. In other words, he knows the biological foundations for mind-bending drugs, keeping the novel within the bounds of plausibility.
The story finally comes around to Chaz’s wife and his art dealer friend. They are in a conspiracy of sorts. The art dealer gave Chaz the Krebs connection, and the wife encourage him to do the forgeries, since it would allow him to earn the money needed for their son’s medical treatment. She also wants Chaz to fulfill his old-masters art potential, as he certainly did by inventing a Velázquez painting that fooled world experts.
Through his hallucinatory time travel, Chaz produced the Alba Venus, which the world now believes is a “lost” painting, presently found. How will history ever know that it’s really not a lost Velasquez, but a time-travel forgery? Chaz put his wife’s birth mark on Venus’s body, that’s how.
The lawyer-friend has the final say at the end of the novel. He watches as the Venus sells on the auction block in Manhattan. He has no reason to doubt the story in the digital files, and he is mulling the prospect of writing the book.
March 21, 2016
Art Analysis in this Novel is Packaged in Emotional Melodrama (no. 34)
The Search for a Triptych Group Portrait Ends in Family Reunion
IN TRACY GUZEMAN’S The Gravity of Birds (2013), the artist theme is strong and the three main characters are obvious. They are two rivalrous sisters and an older painter named Thomas Bayber, whose sexual escapades will seal everyone’s fate.
Yet in this novel, keep your eye on a fourth character in particular, an art authenticator named Stephen Jameson. He is the surprise in the end.
The story begins in 1963 with the summertime encounter between the sisters and the painter at a lakeside resort in New England. Presently, the novel goes fast-forward, giving most of its attention to the threesome's grown-up lives in 2007. In that present time, we first meet Jameson, and for some reason he merits quite a bit of biographical background.
Something is afoot with Jameson, it seems. Even so, he remains an enigma as the story of the artist Bayber and the two sisters travels a predictable storyline of love affairs and jealousies. We are never quite sure why we're being told Jameson's backstory, let alone about his dicey emotional life.
By 2007, Bayber is a famous artist, a recluse in his seventies who is about to die. He discloses an unknown painting of his, which is missing its two wings (it’s a triptych). He asks his loyal biographer, an art historian named Mr. Finch, to contact Jameson the art authenticator and together find the two sisters. It is presumed that they have the other parts of the painting, which will be worth millions at an art auction.
The sisters are Natalie and Alice. We met them in 1963 in their early teens. Natalie is attractive yet troubled. Alice is the intelligent younger sister bound for academic work in ornithology (thus the “bird” title). Alice is crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, though, and will have to give up her professional pursuit.
The only physical action in the story is the research and travels of Finch and Jameson as they try to find the grown women (although in flashback, there is an Alice-giving-birth scene during a Hurricane!). The search for the sisters finally takes Finch and Jameson to Tennessee and New Mexico. They have professional and financial motives to piece together the triptych, while Bayber is apparently trying to reconcile something with Natalie and Alice.
At the outset, Stephen Jameson’s ties to Bayber are nonexistent, with a small exception. Jameson’s father, Dylan Jameson, had owned a popular SoHo art gallery in New York. He had helped promote the career of Bayber, who rose to success as a painter and art-scene playboy.
A main feature of Stephen Jameson is his unhappiness about his late parents, and particularly his father. Stephen is cerebral and awkward. When he made bad decisions in life, his father Dylan gave more scold than hugs, such that “the distance between them seemed cavernous.” Stephen constantly feels an emotional void. Hmm. Interesting!
He is not the only unhappy person in this Gravity of Birds saga. The novel opens with a lengthy poem. We thus know we're entering “literary fiction,” a story of deep meaning and overwrought prose. Readers will differ on whether there is too much of this, of course. The characters seem in perpetual states of sadness, epiphany, anxiety, or regret. In between, mundane life is described in remarkable (or excruciatingly literary) detail—from eating airplane peanuts to the bath oils in a shower.
In writing an art novel, Guzeman has also embraced the challenge of inventing several kinds of artworks. She then describes not only how they look, but the feelings that characters have upon seeing this painting or that sculpture.
The analysis of artworks is a necessary part of the story. That is because the author uses the triptych—a group painting of Bayber, Natalie, Alice, and Alice’s daughter—as a pictorial symbol of the sexual tension between them. The story narrative explains their relationship well enough. But the use of a painting as a symbol introduces an element of artistic melodrama: What dark family secret does the painting reveal?
The secret is this: Around 1963, Natalie was promiscuous. When she got pregnant (not by Bayber), her parents made her get an abortion. She became sterile and thus could never find a husband. Around 1972, Bayber gets Alice pregnant. It's a one-night stand, so they never meet again, though Bayber puts bird images in his paintings, suggesting he misses Alice, who never tells Bayber of the child.
When Natalie notices the pregnancy, she hates Alice for her fertility. So when the daughter is born, Natalie tricks Alice to think the child is stillborn. She secretly sends the infant off to grow up with a loyal housekeeper. As characters, Natalie is remarkably revengeful and Alice equally naïve. Thomas Bayber, meanwhile, is hardly a tragic figure; he’s a selfish rogue, now enervated by excess and age.
What, then, is Stephen Jameson? He and Finch track down Alice, Natalie (who has died by 2007), and Alice’s daughter. This familial context prompts Jameson to dwell on his own family, or lack thereof.
Lo and behold, however, his family also has a dark secret—about to be revealed.
As Finch is taking evidentiary photos of the two lost art panels, he decides to snap one of Alice’s daughter with Stephen. “Something’s wrong here,” Finch says. Then he “pulled the camera away and looked at the two more closely, his heart in this throat.” They look alike. Indeed, Alice's lost daughter and the lonely Stephen are actually brother and sister, Thomas Bayber being their father. Finch says, “So this is the reason he’d [Bayber] insisted on Stephen” authenticating the lost paintings.
The melodrama persists. Suddenly the aged Bayber dies with the photos in his hands. Alice has found her daughter (and vice versa). The widowed Finch (he laments his wife’s death throughout the novel) may have a new girlfriend. And Stephen Jameson has found both his genetic father, Bayber, and his half-sister. (At some point in the past, in other words, the promiscuous Bayber had lain with the wife of Dylan Jameson, the SoHo gallerist and non-biological father of Stephen).
The novel is rich in artistic detail and ambiance. But it is far richer in its constant mix of bad fortune, sudden good fortune, and enough coincidence to make even Charles Dickens blush, but not too strongly.
IN TRACY GUZEMAN’S The Gravity of Birds (2013), the artist theme is strong and the three main characters are obvious. They are two rivalrous sisters and an older painter named Thomas Bayber, whose sexual escapades will seal everyone’s fate.
Yet in this novel, keep your eye on a fourth character in particular, an art authenticator named Stephen Jameson. He is the surprise in the end.
The story begins in 1963 with the summertime encounter between the sisters and the painter at a lakeside resort in New England. Presently, the novel goes fast-forward, giving most of its attention to the threesome's grown-up lives in 2007. In that present time, we first meet Jameson, and for some reason he merits quite a bit of biographical background.
Something is afoot with Jameson, it seems. Even so, he remains an enigma as the story of the artist Bayber and the two sisters travels a predictable storyline of love affairs and jealousies. We are never quite sure why we're being told Jameson's backstory, let alone about his dicey emotional life.
By 2007, Bayber is a famous artist, a recluse in his seventies who is about to die. He discloses an unknown painting of his, which is missing its two wings (it’s a triptych). He asks his loyal biographer, an art historian named Mr. Finch, to contact Jameson the art authenticator and together find the two sisters. It is presumed that they have the other parts of the painting, which will be worth millions at an art auction.
The sisters are Natalie and Alice. We met them in 1963 in their early teens. Natalie is attractive yet troubled. Alice is the intelligent younger sister bound for academic work in ornithology (thus the “bird” title). Alice is crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, though, and will have to give up her professional pursuit.
The only physical action in the story is the research and travels of Finch and Jameson as they try to find the grown women (although in flashback, there is an Alice-giving-birth scene during a Hurricane!). The search for the sisters finally takes Finch and Jameson to Tennessee and New Mexico. They have professional and financial motives to piece together the triptych, while Bayber is apparently trying to reconcile something with Natalie and Alice.
At the outset, Stephen Jameson’s ties to Bayber are nonexistent, with a small exception. Jameson’s father, Dylan Jameson, had owned a popular SoHo art gallery in New York. He had helped promote the career of Bayber, who rose to success as a painter and art-scene playboy.
A main feature of Stephen Jameson is his unhappiness about his late parents, and particularly his father. Stephen is cerebral and awkward. When he made bad decisions in life, his father Dylan gave more scold than hugs, such that “the distance between them seemed cavernous.” Stephen constantly feels an emotional void. Hmm. Interesting!
He is not the only unhappy person in this Gravity of Birds saga. The novel opens with a lengthy poem. We thus know we're entering “literary fiction,” a story of deep meaning and overwrought prose. Readers will differ on whether there is too much of this, of course. The characters seem in perpetual states of sadness, epiphany, anxiety, or regret. In between, mundane life is described in remarkable (or excruciatingly literary) detail—from eating airplane peanuts to the bath oils in a shower.
In writing an art novel, Guzeman has also embraced the challenge of inventing several kinds of artworks. She then describes not only how they look, but the feelings that characters have upon seeing this painting or that sculpture.
The analysis of artworks is a necessary part of the story. That is because the author uses the triptych—a group painting of Bayber, Natalie, Alice, and Alice’s daughter—as a pictorial symbol of the sexual tension between them. The story narrative explains their relationship well enough. But the use of a painting as a symbol introduces an element of artistic melodrama: What dark family secret does the painting reveal?
The secret is this: Around 1963, Natalie was promiscuous. When she got pregnant (not by Bayber), her parents made her get an abortion. She became sterile and thus could never find a husband. Around 1972, Bayber gets Alice pregnant. It's a one-night stand, so they never meet again, though Bayber puts bird images in his paintings, suggesting he misses Alice, who never tells Bayber of the child.
When Natalie notices the pregnancy, she hates Alice for her fertility. So when the daughter is born, Natalie tricks Alice to think the child is stillborn. She secretly sends the infant off to grow up with a loyal housekeeper. As characters, Natalie is remarkably revengeful and Alice equally naïve. Thomas Bayber, meanwhile, is hardly a tragic figure; he’s a selfish rogue, now enervated by excess and age.
What, then, is Stephen Jameson? He and Finch track down Alice, Natalie (who has died by 2007), and Alice’s daughter. This familial context prompts Jameson to dwell on his own family, or lack thereof.
Lo and behold, however, his family also has a dark secret—about to be revealed.
As Finch is taking evidentiary photos of the two lost art panels, he decides to snap one of Alice’s daughter with Stephen. “Something’s wrong here,” Finch says. Then he “pulled the camera away and looked at the two more closely, his heart in this throat.” They look alike. Indeed, Alice's lost daughter and the lonely Stephen are actually brother and sister, Thomas Bayber being their father. Finch says, “So this is the reason he’d [Bayber] insisted on Stephen” authenticating the lost paintings.
The melodrama persists. Suddenly the aged Bayber dies with the photos in his hands. Alice has found her daughter (and vice versa). The widowed Finch (he laments his wife’s death throughout the novel) may have a new girlfriend. And Stephen Jameson has found both his genetic father, Bayber, and his half-sister. (At some point in the past, in other words, the promiscuous Bayber had lain with the wife of Dylan Jameson, the SoHo gallerist and non-biological father of Stephen).
The novel is rich in artistic detail and ambiance. But it is far richer in its constant mix of bad fortune, sudden good fortune, and enough coincidence to make even Charles Dickens blush, but not too strongly.
March 17, 2016
Updike’s ‘The Centaur’ is his Rare Novel to Feature an Artist (no. 33)
The Prolific Prose Gives Way to a Spare Description in this Story
THE LATE NOVELIST John Updike was rarely a man of few words, at least when it came to his ebullient prose. An exception may be his first of two novels about an artist, The Centaur (1963), which won the National Book Award for fiction.
The story is about Peter Caldwell, a young man who, now living in Manhattan, looks back on the life he had with his mother and father in rural Pennsylvania. However, we don’t really discover the adult narrator’s state of mind—indeed, that he is an adult artist—until the very end of the novel.
Throughout the story, we learn that Peter grows up with a grandfather who is a Protestant minister and a father who is a public school science teacher. As to what Peter himself has become, Updike saves until the last. Just before the novel is over, Peter tells us “I am my father’s son. . . . Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.”
It is the 1960s when Peter gives us his recollections. The former country boy has obviously gone avant-garde. He has a loft in SoHo, lives with a black girlfriend, and muses about Tibetan lamas, yin and yang, Freud, and oriental sex mysticism.
We had hints of Peter's artistic fate, of course. During his youth, he had visited the local museum. There, he saw clumsy paintings by local artists, which “nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas.” Peter wanted to do this, too, someday.
In all, The Centaur's narrative about a brief period in Peter's youth is a story of his father’s sacrifices for his family, especially for a son who turns out quite different, ending up a modernist, urban artist. The genius of The Centaur, though, is that Updike has modeled this somewhat mundane American tale on the Greek myth of Chiron, “the noblest and wisest of the centaurs.” It thus becomes a strange, evocative family reminiscence.
In the Greek legend, Chiron is seriously wounded by an arrow, but is unable to die because of his immortality. He can escape that pain only by giving up his life for his son, Prometheus, who would also be doomed otherwise. It is a story of parental self-sacrifice (and in Greek mythology, at least, sacrifice for a greater good, since Prometheus can now give fire to humans).
In Updike’s retelling of the myth, Olympus, the home of Chiron, becomes Olinger High School outside Alton, Pa., in 1947. Chiron becomes Peter’s father, George Caldwell. He endures both real and mythological pain as a science teacher bedeviled by a school bureaucracy. Mixing mythic fantasy with reality, the novel recounts how one day in science class, for example, a student shoots Caldwell with an arrow (as in the Greek myth). After class, Caldwell tries to extract the arrow from his leg (and school life simply goes on).
The Caldwell family story is about father George’s disappointments in life. He once had been a high school sports hero. He was also a brave soldier in the war. Now he is locked into a dull career, hoping to “stay in there” to retire with a pension.
Peter, the son, also has his problems, afflicted with a skin condition and tending toward being a loner. He watches his father’s life. Through it all, of course, Peter’s father is making sacrifices (that is, simply rearing the family) so that his son can make his own future choices.
By the time of The Centaur, Updike had already written his first Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), which, according to the critics, has the underlying theme of a suburbanite trying to escape his humdrum life. The same mood infuses The Centaur. Although George Caldwell is never able to escape (as he’d like), his son apparently does, having made it to New York and to the 1960s art scene.
Updike, who died in 2009, has made The Centaur fairly autobiographical, granted that the novel’s main feature is its linkage to Greek mythology. Updike was reared in Reading, Pa., and his father was a school teacher. Updike also left the countryside for the Ivy League and the big city. He is obviously grateful for the sacrifices that his father (and mother, an aspiring writer) made for him, though his novels do comment acidly on the conformist lives of his parents’ generation.
That an artist appears in an early Updike novel makes sense, since he’d been one himself, sort of. At Harvard he was a cartoonist (and writer) for the satirical The Harvard Lampoon. He received an art scholarship to Oxford University, putting him on the fence about which career—illustration or writing—he might pursue. Famed editor E.B. White met him and tipped the balance, offering Updike a job at The New Yorker (to write the witty “Talk of the Town” column).
Updike became a chronicler of modern-day life and anxiety, often putting large doses of sex and religion—two topics that fascinated him—into his plots. Near the end of his life, Updike wrote a second novel (of twenty-eight) about an artist, Seek My Face (2002), the tale of a one-day interview with an elderly female artist named Hope, whose recollections tell the story of postwar American art. Unlike The Centaur, the artist's character is revealed from the start, and in depth, whereas with Peter-the-adult-artist, only at the end do we learn where he has ended up—in New York, feeling sad sympathy for his father, apparently. And we learn this in a few spare, almost oblique, references in the novel’s final pages.
THE LATE NOVELIST John Updike was rarely a man of few words, at least when it came to his ebullient prose. An exception may be his first of two novels about an artist, The Centaur (1963), which won the National Book Award for fiction.
The story is about Peter Caldwell, a young man who, now living in Manhattan, looks back on the life he had with his mother and father in rural Pennsylvania. However, we don’t really discover the adult narrator’s state of mind—indeed, that he is an adult artist—until the very end of the novel.
Throughout the story, we learn that Peter grows up with a grandfather who is a Protestant minister and a father who is a public school science teacher. As to what Peter himself has become, Updike saves until the last. Just before the novel is over, Peter tells us “I am my father’s son. . . . Priest, teacher, artist: the classic degeneration.”
It is the 1960s when Peter gives us his recollections. The former country boy has obviously gone avant-garde. He has a loft in SoHo, lives with a black girlfriend, and muses about Tibetan lamas, yin and yang, Freud, and oriental sex mysticism.
We had hints of Peter's artistic fate, of course. During his youth, he had visited the local museum. There, he saw clumsy paintings by local artists, which “nevertheless radiated the innocence and hope, the hope of seizing something and holding it fast, that enters whenever a brush touches canvas.” Peter wanted to do this, too, someday.
In all, The Centaur's narrative about a brief period in Peter's youth is a story of his father’s sacrifices for his family, especially for a son who turns out quite different, ending up a modernist, urban artist. The genius of The Centaur, though, is that Updike has modeled this somewhat mundane American tale on the Greek myth of Chiron, “the noblest and wisest of the centaurs.” It thus becomes a strange, evocative family reminiscence.
In the Greek legend, Chiron is seriously wounded by an arrow, but is unable to die because of his immortality. He can escape that pain only by giving up his life for his son, Prometheus, who would also be doomed otherwise. It is a story of parental self-sacrifice (and in Greek mythology, at least, sacrifice for a greater good, since Prometheus can now give fire to humans).
In Updike’s retelling of the myth, Olympus, the home of Chiron, becomes Olinger High School outside Alton, Pa., in 1947. Chiron becomes Peter’s father, George Caldwell. He endures both real and mythological pain as a science teacher bedeviled by a school bureaucracy. Mixing mythic fantasy with reality, the novel recounts how one day in science class, for example, a student shoots Caldwell with an arrow (as in the Greek myth). After class, Caldwell tries to extract the arrow from his leg (and school life simply goes on).
The Caldwell family story is about father George’s disappointments in life. He once had been a high school sports hero. He was also a brave soldier in the war. Now he is locked into a dull career, hoping to “stay in there” to retire with a pension.
Peter, the son, also has his problems, afflicted with a skin condition and tending toward being a loner. He watches his father’s life. Through it all, of course, Peter’s father is making sacrifices (that is, simply rearing the family) so that his son can make his own future choices.
By the time of The Centaur, Updike had already written his first Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), which, according to the critics, has the underlying theme of a suburbanite trying to escape his humdrum life. The same mood infuses The Centaur. Although George Caldwell is never able to escape (as he’d like), his son apparently does, having made it to New York and to the 1960s art scene.
Updike, who died in 2009, has made The Centaur fairly autobiographical, granted that the novel’s main feature is its linkage to Greek mythology. Updike was reared in Reading, Pa., and his father was a school teacher. Updike also left the countryside for the Ivy League and the big city. He is obviously grateful for the sacrifices that his father (and mother, an aspiring writer) made for him, though his novels do comment acidly on the conformist lives of his parents’ generation.
That an artist appears in an early Updike novel makes sense, since he’d been one himself, sort of. At Harvard he was a cartoonist (and writer) for the satirical The Harvard Lampoon. He received an art scholarship to Oxford University, putting him on the fence about which career—illustration or writing—he might pursue. Famed editor E.B. White met him and tipped the balance, offering Updike a job at The New Yorker (to write the witty “Talk of the Town” column).
Updike became a chronicler of modern-day life and anxiety, often putting large doses of sex and religion—two topics that fascinated him—into his plots. Near the end of his life, Updike wrote a second novel (of twenty-eight) about an artist, Seek My Face (2002), the tale of a one-day interview with an elderly female artist named Hope, whose recollections tell the story of postwar American art. Unlike The Centaur, the artist's character is revealed from the start, and in depth, whereas with Peter-the-adult-artist, only at the end do we learn where he has ended up—in New York, feeling sad sympathy for his father, apparently. And we learn this in a few spare, almost oblique, references in the novel’s final pages.
Novelists on Artists
A blog exploring the ways that fiction, past and present, has portrayed artists and the art world. By Larry Witham, author of Gallery Pieces: An Art Mystery.
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