An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (32 page)

U is for Underground Train
(
Part of Stephen’s London Alphabet, drawn when he was ten.
)

Notre Dame, drawn when Stephen was fourteen.

Stephen’s rendition of Matisse’s Dance conflates the drawing of the Hermitage version with the colors of the Museum of Modern Art version.

A Matisse face (upper left), reproduced by Stephen directly, and then by memory at hourly intervals.

The old houses on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, as seen from Stephen’s hotel window.

The Doge’s Palace in Venice.

One of several drawings Stephen made of St. Basil’s, in Red Square.

An aerial view of the Chrysler Building in New York, from the top of the Pan Am Building.

A lavish interior at the Chicago Theater.

Three tiny sketches, done at speed: an Arizona landscape, an elephant at the London Zoo, and St. Basil
’s.

Stephen, only thirteen, was now famous throughout England—but as autistic, as disabled, as ever. He could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself. He could see all London in his mind’s eye, but its human aspects were unintelligible to him. He could not maintain a real conversation with anyone, though, increasingly, he now showed a sort of pseudosocial conduct, talking to strangers in an indiscriminate and bizarre way.

Chris had been away for some months in Australia and returned to find his young pupil famous—but, he thought, completely unchanged. “He recognized that he’d been on TV, and that he’d had a book published, but he didn’t go overboard, as many children would have done. He wasn’t affected; he was still the Stephen I knew.” Stephen had not seemed to miss Chris too much during his absence, but seemed glad to see him back, said “Hullo, Chris!” with a big smile on his face.

None of this quite added up for me. Here was Stephen being exhibited as a significant artist—the former president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Hugh Casson, had called him “possibly the best child artist in Britain”—but Chris and others, even the most sympathetic, seemed to see him as greatly lacking in both intellect and identity. The tests that had been given to him seemed to confirm the severity of his emotional and intellectual defect. Was there, nonetheless, a mental and personal dimension, a depth and sensibility, in him that could emerge (if nowhere else) in his art? Was not art, quintessentially, an expression of a personal vision, a self? Could one be an artist without having a “self?” All these questions had been in my mind since I had first seen Stephen’s pictures, and I was eager to meet him.