Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (40 page)

I told the visitors at the exhibition that native painters were visionary artists and had always created scenes of visual memories, and native visual scenes were never based on the liturgy of names or institutions. The visitors easily recognized the recent innovations of impressionistic, fauvist, and cubist art, the original abstract scenes and elusive hues of form and structure. The bright colors conveyed the heart, passion, and creative perceptions of instinct and natural motion.

Some visitors at the gallery that night compared the blue ravens and bridges painted by my brother to the particular abstract, fauvist, and cubist styles of paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, André Derain, and Marc Chagall.

Aloysius was inspired by other original painters, of course, but never directly influenced by impressionism, fauvism, or cubism. He honored the great avant-garde painters, but not the mere ideologies of artistic styles. My brother painted ravens with natural wild blues, but never painted political ideas or competed with any other artists in the world. He created visionary native scenes in natural motion, a style that was original, untutored, and conceived on the White Earth Reservation.

The Pont Mirabeau was the most sensational blue ravenesque portrait in the series of the thirty-six blue bridges at the exhibition. The scene was mounted separately on the back wall of the gallery. Aloysius had painted an unsteady and awkward totemic tower of four bronze statues, and with the
same number of blue ravens. The actual green statues on the two piers of the bridge were painted hues of blue on the totemic tower.

The abstract totemic statues only slightly resembled the four majestic bronze figures on the arches of the glorious Pont Mirabeau. Two actual statues, allegories of navigation and commerce on the prow and stern of a symbolic boat, were mounted in downstream positions. The statue at the prow carried a
francisque
, a hatchet or tomahawk, and the other statue at the stern carried the gear for the symbolic boat. The two bronze statues on the second symbolic boat, a nude woman with a golden horn at the prow, and a figure with a torch at the stern, were mounted on the bridge pier in the upstream positions on the River Seine.

Aloysius created the abstract totems of four blue ravenesque figures with tomahawks, torches, boat gear, and temple trumpets. Several blue ravens were intertwined over the tower. The cones of the blue temple trumpets were touched with rouge.

Sections of the metal bridge were curved and stacked at the bottom of the totemic tower. The abstract images of blue feathers, temple horns, and torches were afloat on the River Seine.

The Pont Mirabeau portrait was more than a reflection, but rather an intrinsic perception of the abstract reflection of the bridge on the water. The ravenesque portraits in the entire series were the mythic presence of color and motion in the reflection of the River Seine.

Nathan Crémieux stood near the sensational portrait of the Pont Mirabeau and read out loud the poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire. More than forty visitors gathered around to hear my favorite poem read in French. “Le Pont Mirabeau” was published in
Alcools
, a selection of his recent poetry. Nathan read slowly, and with a resonant voice. The audience was moved by the visual images of each word of the poem.

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne

La joie venait toujours après la peine

Olivier Black Elk, Coyote Standing Bear, and other natives in our commune at the Café du Dôme arrived later at the exhibition. No one was surprised that the two prominent pretenders were more interested in the
ethnographic representations of native traditions and cultures. Predictably the most uncertain and anxious pretenders were the negotiators of native conventions and authenticity.

The abstract visionary scenes of blue ravens and the broken images of bridges on the river were not easily poached or earmarked as customary. The pretense of native ancestry withered with abstract images and native irony. Olivier and Coyote were never critical of natives, and wisely used elusive
praise, grand, bright, brilliant, to comment on the blue ravenesque portraits.

The wounded veterans of the commune at the Square du Vert-Galant on the River Seine were truly transformed by the totemic presence of blue ravens and the fractures of the obvious. The veterans had discovered in the abstract portraits of the bridges the creative rage and passion of blue ravens, and the cracks and marbled scenes of mirrors. Once the natural scenes were changed by the creative turns of reflections and breaks of the ordinary, the wounds of the body, the
mutilés de guerre
, became only ephemeral reflections on the surface, and easily transmuted by imagination and the natural tease of aesthetics and disability.

Pierre Chaisson was inspired by the portraits of the blue ravens and declared at the exhibition that the wounds of the veterans were the very first cubist perceptions. Wounded veterans were the artists of their body images and reflections, and the natural motion of the river forever created a new aesthetic face in the water.

The common and familiar body was only a cultural reflection, he announced, and the amputations, scars, creases, burns, patchwork pare and skin, cracked features, and cockeyed ears, arms, and more, were abstract creations of wounds and original scenes and reflections in the new aesthetics of humane cubist portraiture.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler closely studied each of the blue raven portraits. He returned to peruse the Pont Mirabeau and Pont Alexandre III several times, but never gestured or commented on the composition or style. Silence, and no obvious gestures, discussions or descriptive observation of paintings was his signature manner as a gallery owner.

Kahnweiler remembered our conversation several months earlier, rather the translation of our conversation, at Shakespeare and Company. I presumed he was impressed with at least one portrait, but he was resolute and avoided even the invitation of a general comment.

I mentioned
Ulysses
by James Joyce, but the art collector evaded any comments about literature in the same manner as art. We talked awkwardly about the
mutilés de guerre
and forsaken wounded veterans in France and Germany. I was moved by the lonesome gestures of his eyes, the ordinary consequence of a wise and perceptive outsider. Kahnweiler was a German more at home in the liberty of France.

Kahnweiler and Georges Braque were engaged in a serious conversation later about the portraits of the Pont au Change and Pont Mirabeau. I only heard the words
guillotine
and
poteau de totem
, but the gestures of the cubist artist and the art collector were animated and favorable. Naturally, the hierarchy of the blue ravens was much higher on the totemic towers than the bronze statues on the Pont Mirabeau. Kahnweiler was the first gallery owner to exhibit the cubist paintings of Braque.

Marie Vassilieff was prepared to purchase the portrait of the Pont des Arts, but we refused to accept the money. The Pont Neuf portraits were priced at twelve hundred francs, or about sixty dollars at the time, and each of the other portraits were one thousand francs, or about fifty dollars. Aloysius was actually amazed that anyone would pay a thousand francs or fifty dollars for one of his blue raven portraits. My brother was an extraordinary painter, but he worried that the sale of only one portrait was the total average salary for two weeks of labor in Minneapolis, and even more hours of labor in Paris. Aloysius reminisced that night that we had started out hawking the
Tomahawk
for a few pennies a copy some sixteen years earlier at the Ogema Station on the White Earth Reservation.

Nathan invited the visitors at the gallery to gather around and honor the cubist painter Marie Vassilieff for her artistic integrity and generosity during the war to a generation of hungry artists in Paris. Aloysius removed the framed portrait from the wall, and most of the visitors signed the back of the Pont des Arts.

Georges Braque hailed the memorable dinner that Marie had prepared when he returned from the war as a wounded soldier. The artists and others at the gallery saluted the exceptional devotion of Marie Vassilieff who had established La Cantine des Artistes at Le Chemin du Montparnasse.

Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde art collector, attended the exhibition at the Galerie
Crémieux. Sylvia told me that she was impressed with the similarities of innovative authors and avant-garde painters, and that words and images had been transformed by the experiences of the war.

Gertrude Stein studied the scenes of blue ravens in the new École Indienne in France. Naturally, she had cornered the apparent native artist. Olivier Black Elk wore his Boss of the Plains black hat, so she assumed that he was the actual artist. The pretender was pleased, of course, to describe the new school of visionary native artists, and then wisely directed her attention to Aloysius.

Gertrude was curious about native avant-garde artists and writers, and she was aware of my newspaper stories about the wounded veterans. I instantly resisted her direct, severe, and rather possessive manner, and changed the subject with equivocal comments. My stories were evasive representations, an abstract native practice that was suitable for arrogant inquisitors, and hardly descriptive, punctual, or dramatic. At the time my responses were effective evasions. Gertrude was distracted and looked away, but a few minutes later, as she was leaving the gallery, she asked me if I knew the young writer Ernest Hemingway. No, but she insisted that we should meet.

Nathan sold nine portrayals that night at the gallery, including the four scenes of the Pont Neuf. He was certain the other portraits would be sold that summer. Nathan earned thirty percent of the sale price of the portraits. Aloysius was ecstatic that so many portrayals had sold at the first formal gallery exhibition. Nathan was in high spirits and invited Marie, Aloysius, Pierre, and me to celebrate the outcome of the exhibition over a late dinner at the Café du Dôme.

Nathan was acquainted with many poets and writers but he had never actually met Ernest Hemingway. Several waiters explained that the writer had caroused at the café many times with other writers and artists. The waiters looked around the café and confirmed that the writer was not there that night.

Marie was at my side at the table. We drank white wine and talked about the gallery and the heartfelt reaction of the wounded veterans to the blue raven portraits. She was intrigued by my new stories of the veterans. Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire, she reminded me, were both wounded in the war.

I was enticed, as usual, by her passion, generous spirit, and sympathetic gestures, and aroused by the motion of hands, the turn of her eyes, and especially the touch of her thigh under the table. My thoughts turned to the image of her reclined and nude in the portrait by Amedeo Modigliani.

Marie reached out to hold my hand at the end of the dinner, and we walked to her atelier at Chemin du Montparnasse. I was silent, and almost breathless with excitement that night. Marie was radiant in the faint light, and the touch and scent of her lovely body lingered forever in my memory.

Nathan sold eleven more ravenesque portraits that month, and for that reason and the revolution he was eager to celebrate Bastille Day. Naturally, he was our escort that Saturday, July 14, 1923. First we were present for a traditional military parade in the morning on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The French soldiers wore smart uniforms, tricolor sashes, white plumes, and shiny helmets, and the enthusiasm of the citizens on the streets was marvelous.

We had not been exposed to military formations or ceremonies since our honorable discharge five years earlier, but that morning the martial music and rhythmic sound of the precision march of soldiers inspired strong emotions and memories. The banners, trumpets, horns, and national music were everywhere. We were excited and ready to become citizens of France.

Nathan had reserved a table for lunch at a café near the Place de la Bastille, the location of the former prison, and the very site of the start of the revolution. The children wore hats, starched cotton, high white stockings, middy blouses, and danced in the streets. We were inspired and humane natives at the very heart and memory of a great liberty, the commemoration of a brutal war with the aristocratic
ancien régime
that began on July 14, 1789.

The French fur trade and the
coureurs des bois
, tricky outlaw traders, and later the
voyageurs
, fur traders in canoes, had already declared by stories and songs a premier union with our ancestors the native Anishinaabe near the
gichigami
, Lake Superior, and at the legendary headwaters of the
gichiziibi
, the Mississippi River.

The
Colonne de Juillet
, July Column, a monument dead center of the square, was created to commemorate the stories of the prison, the visual Storming of the Bastille, and the inevitable war with
l'ancien régime
. The
Génie de la Liberté
, the Spirit of Freedom, was a golden statue, a winged
spirit, mounted on the crown of the great column at the Place de la Bastille. Together we saluted the golden spirit of the
Révolution française
and the esprit de corps of
liberté
in France. Then, of course, we ordered our lunch to avoid the crowds. More than eight thousand citizens were there that morning of the French Revolution in 1789.

Singular names of the dead, golden statues, and marvelous state monuments were much easier to remember than the abstract cause, excuse, and fury of revolutions. Everyone was prepared for the grand celebration of the insurgence, revolution, and liberty, but no one was ready to remove the partisan shrouds of slaughter, and recount the actual cadavers of sovereignty abandoned in mortuaries and morgues.

Aloysius outlined an enormous blue raven on the column, and native visionary wings replaced the golden wings of the
Génie de la Liberté.
No one is prepared for revolution or war, or for the revisions of peace, but only for the celebration of victories and surrender treaties. We were not prepared for war, and we were never prepared to live on federal reservations. We learned to evade dominance with ironic and visionary stories. We became creative artists, a writer and a painter, and conceived of our sense of
liberté
in Paris. The world of creative art and literature was our revolution, our sense of native presence and sanctuary.