“I’m too late, aren’t I? I knew I would be—traffic was so bad, and I drive so poorly in bad traffic.” He knew he was saying too much, but he’d lost the ability to edit his speech some time ago.
“Sorry? Too late for what?” The young woman looked pretty, and amused. Young enough to be his daughter.
He imagined the heat in his face might be presenting itself as a blush. “The tour? The Postmodern Figure?”
“Well, yes. But they just started a tour for one of the local college art classes. You could follow right along. If you stay close I’m sure you could still hear. No one would care, really. I promise I won’t turn you in.”
He laughed, but only because he thought he was supposed to. He had no idea why some people thought such dialogs humorous—he just recognized that they did. He hurried along, his long winter coat flapping around his knees. He’d be too hot pretty soon, he knew, and then he’d have to decide whether to be uncomfortable wearing it, or awkward carrying it around. His wife had always had a good suggestion or two for such dilemmas, but he’d found that the further he traveled away from her, the tinier his ability to make a simple decision. It was a kind of perspective he’d never heard of, and could find no mention of in the volumes of art history he’d bought since her death.
“After the war the human figure was trivialized in modern art. It was made to appear insignificant, unreliable, and pitiable. Eventually it all but disappeared from the work of serious artists, as if they thought it beneath their notice, that it had nothing significant to say anymore. Art became dehumanized, less emblematic. As the prime emblem of our daily experience, the figure had to go.”
He wanted to protest, to argue with the young guide, but of course she was only doing her job, and, as far as he knew, was completely correct. But he still found it humbling to hear, and was it just his imagination or did some of these students shrink back a bit from her words, become smaller, a bit self-conscious? He himself became more aware of the size of these canvases, many times human size, so that they seemed architectural, part of the walls, which he now realized were of varying heights, many several stories high, making triangles with the sloped ceilings, which swooped down overhead at times, threatening the heads of the patrons with sharp corners and unfriendly windows. He thought those windows were the kinds of windows an angel might use, or some other holy and invisible creature, and considered this an alarmingly odd perception, although perhaps one not so surprising to have in an art museum.
It was at this point, or so he would conclude later, that he first became aware of the figures in the next room of the gallery, beginning to emerge from hiding, just their outlines peeking from the corridor, but when he turned and tried to take their measure, they were gone, and although he stood and waited, they did not reappear.
By the time he gave up looking for them the tour had moved on without him, and he had to hurry to catch up, feeling hot and uncomfortable as he did so, and wishing he had made the decision simply to carry his coat. He was always conscious of perspiring heavily inside his clothing, and, although he bathed regularly, worried about smelling.
“Eventually traces of the human figure began to appear in these huge, near-empty canvases. Perhaps not the figure itself, not at first, but the effects of its presence. It was coming out of hiding, it seems, but you might say it was being very cautious about the entire endeavor. The figure became tool and material, and eventually it became battleground.”
At the guide’s invitation the students spent some time with these images. Some nodded agreeably with what she had to say, and some had a skeptical air about them, but appeared careful to keep their own figures neutral, betraying no opinion. He dutifully traveled from painting to painting, and sometimes it felt like a journey of years. He had not heard of most of these artists’ names, but tried to memorize them so he could look them up later, find out what else they had done, read what they had to say for themselves.
Still, he felt an urge to leave the tour and seek out a Chagall, or a Soutine, one of the Jewish painters he liked so much, or even an expressionist like Robert Beauchamp, whose figures, with their nervousness and agitation, had become almost cartoonish in their attempts to recede and hide inside the paint. As for his own shy figures, he could still feel them lurking nearby, but thought it non-strategic to seek them out.
“There’s still some jokiness about the figure’s re-emergence, don’t you think? A kind of coyness that invites us in. I find that refreshing, don’t you? Art needn’t be so stuffy. It can look at itself with good humor.”
Perhaps he had no sense of humor when it came to art. Perhaps he was too serious about most things and that was his problem. His wife used to complain about his inappropriate joking, but she also understood that impulse of his came out of a belief that the world was a grim and serious place.
He felt a bit of palsy now in his right hand, and stared at it with eyes that did not focus well anymore. Between the two tendencies he was presented with an image of his hand with no clear lines, nothing firm to hold his flesh in. He felt his tears approaching, and stopped them by grabbing the hand firmly with its left partner, which held it decisively but tenderly in check.
He distracted himself from this localized drama by looking at the largest painting in the room. He didn’t recognize this part of the gallery and wasn’t aware of when the tour might have advanced here. At first he could see no figures in the painting, but then he found the one wavering line suggestive of a hesitant forward motion.
“For years the figure practically vanished from contemporary art.”
He continued to stare at the wavering line in the right third of the painting. He didn’t care for this kind of scraggly, wiggly art. He never had, except where someone like Beauchamp was concerned, who had this indefinable knack. For the most part, he could never find the emotion in this kind of work. But for some reason he felt this particular painting—in fact he found himself almost moved to tears. He saw more motion in that wavering line in the canvas than in his entire life, as it left its trace in the chaos, as it made its mark.
He looked at the artist’s name. Daniel Richter. A German. The name wasn’t completely unfamiliar, but it was still one that hadn’t been on his radar. As he walked among the other Richter paintings, most of them larger-than-life size, he was impressed by their colors, explosive and alive with blood and neon, living now, and not in some memory of days before, and as more and more of the figures began to appear, coagulating out of the aggressive paint, but still hiding, or attempting to hide, it struck him that so many of the figures weren’t much more than outlines, really, and inside those recognizably human outlines floated pools and bursts of color. But it wasn’t a portrayal of exterior resemblance on these canvases, but of a peculiar sort of interior, the interior a medical technician might see in an MRI, or the auras of variously colored heat observable by means of some sort of specialized surveillance equipment, or from the cold and inhuman sensory apparatus of a heat-seeking missile now rapidly advancing on its all-too-vulnerable human targets.
For now he did not sense the shy figures he had encountered earlier—perhaps they were wandering the other galleries, reluctant to enter this one, as if worried they might dissolve within the intense colors and the brilliant lights.
But he had no time for this kind of fantastical speculation in any case. He was too busy examining the figures trapped within these paintings, or if not “figures,” the evidence that figures had once been there, and now these were the prints their bodies had left behind upon impact with the world, or, looked at another way, their medical records, and the documentation of their trauma.