The Art of Death (6 page)
Authors: Margarite St. John
Appledorn Exploratorium
Friday, May 10, 2013
Madeleine Harrod was in her element. She loved being in Indianapolis, where the action was. A bustling city was more to her liking than the farm she’d returned to. She enjoyed brainstorming with her highly skilled designers, technicians, and managers to produce a new facial reconstruction kit for the scientific toy market. Most of all, she relished her authority to bring all discussions to a close with a decision that could not be appealed.
Appledorn Exploratorium’s offices in the OneAmerica Tower resembled pictures she’d seen of Silicon Valley’s open-plan offices where
wunderkind
from many disciplines generated innovative ideas amidst a welter of computer stations, cozy reading corners, high-tech electronics, whimsical playground equipment for relaxation, coffee bars, and a tatami alcove, dominated by a bust of Buddha, for meditation. In other words, the office was a confounding hash of scientific laboratory, yoga studio, nondenominational chapel, and atelier.
ApEx, as the company was commonly known, was staffed mostly by people in the 30 - 55 age range. For older Baby Boomers, the place was disorienting, too unstructured and unprofessional, redolent of New Age nonsense. For Generation Y twenty-somethings, the place offered too much freedom and possessed too few boundaries. But the place suited Generation X, the cohort born between the mid-60s and mid-80s. Perhaps because it was also Madeleine’s cohort, Generation X was the only one she believed possessed the free-thinking creativity and finely-honed talent needed to design an original product as well as the work ethic to get it manufactured to specifications on time at a reasonable cost.
ApEx produced many successful lines of facial reconstruction kits. The Seven Vixens of the Ancient World had been launched several years earlier. Cleopatra had led the way, followed by her murdered half-sister, Arsinoe IV, whose remains excited the world of professional and amateur archaeologists when they were found in Ephesus in 1926. They’d been lost for years, then rediscovered, and only recently subjected to scientific tests. The two kits appealed to a global market because Cleopatra, a Ptolemy, was thought to be pure Greek, whereas Arsinoe was thought to have had an African mother. “Expert” forensic reconstructions of the sisters’ faces had been performed around the world, but there was no authoritative look, so amateurs had scope for their imaginations. Besides the usual skulls, pegs, clay, ears, and eyeballs, the kits had been juiced up with wigs, serpentine hair adornments, theatrical eye makeup, biographical booklets explaining why Cleopatra had Arsinoe murdered, and in Cleopatra’s case an asp and a basket, although that version of her death was now heavily disputed. The presentations were a bit gimmicky but they sold well.
As a companion line, The Seven Villains of the Ancient World started with Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. For some reason, kits about men did not typically sell as well as kits about women.
Nevertheless, today’s subject was once again a man, Richard III, who was crowned King of England on July 6, 1483. He would launch a new line called Infamous Kings and Queens. His skeleton, missing its feet, had only recently been discovered under a parking lot in England. A variety of scientific tests confirmed that the remains were indeed those of the king who had been vilified by his Tudor successors and even Shakespeare. And they confirmed that though he didn’t have a withered arm, as Shakespeare claimed, he indeed had a curved spine and was probably hunch-backed. His unexpected rise to the crown, his ignominious death at the Battle of Bosworth, the legend that he had killed the Princes in the Tower, his unprepossessing appearance -- all suggested his facial reconstruction kit would be a hit if it could be launched at the height of the furor. Timing was everything.
No one was more excited than Madeleine Harrod by the news that the skeleton under the parking lot was really Richard III’s. It was, she believed, a sign. To her, reincarnation was not a theory but a fact. When she was thirteen, after a particularly vivid session with Dr. Beltrami involving regression analysis, she haltingly told her father that she believed many years ago she was a girl married to a man with a hunchback and he was a king. She had had long blond hair and beautiful jewels and thought her name had been Anne. She described a headdress in preposterous detail. Her mother, who was lying on the sofa with a cold cloth over her eyes, roused herself enough to mumble, “Richard III.”
“What?” Chester asked. “Speak up.”
“The hunchback who was king was Richard III. I read the play in high school.”
After that, Madeleine had many other such visions, though the only person she ever told, other than Dr. Beltrami, of course, was her father in the presence of her mother.
At first, Dorothy had listened to her daughter’s visions of previous lives without much comment. But finally, one day when Mattie described a poisoning she thought occurred in the ancient library of Alexandria amidst shelves of heavy papyrus scrolls and carved columns, Dorothy had had enough. From the couch, she said, “Beware, Mattie. The devil’s speaking through you.”
Neither Chester nor Mattie replied to that ominous statement. But the regression analysis continued, so the visions of previous lives continued too. Mattie faithfully related them to her credulous father and skeptical mother. If only Dorothy had lived, she’d have seen that Dr. Beltrami’s regression analysis was vindicated, for the previous lives Madeleine “remembered” launched a global business.
Today, in the middle of a round conference table sat two creepy, decapitated, three-dimensional objects. One was a model of Richard III’s skull found last September during an archaeological dig in Leicester, Britain’s Midlands. The other was his reconstructed head: black ear-length hair, faintly misaligned dark eyes under bushy black eyebrows, aquiline nose, rosy cheeks, chiseled lips, square jaw. The British forensic team that created the original reconstruction had dazzling credentials, bringing together DNA analysis, CT scans, genealogical research, osteology, carbon dating, forensic art, digital reconstruction, and stereolithography.
But the head reconstructed by British experts irritated Madeleine, who stared at its twin with distaste, not because she found decapitated heads to be creepy, but because this one looked far too soft, almost friendly, and far too generic for the character she imagined she had once been married to. His eyes should be more penetrating, his skin sallower, his cheeks hollower. He should look like the highly skilled fighter he was. Perhaps there should be just the faintest suggestion of surprise, either at becoming king at all or at dying in the ignominious way he did. Despite the British team’s dazzling credentials, Madeleine was sure that under her leadership her team could do better.
By the time the brainstorming session ended and Madeleine had sketched a new face for the King, Richard III’s face had morphed into a far more saturnine and devious image than the British experts imagined.
Though every one of Madeleine’s staff was practically a genius in a particular discipline, and though each person was proud of being an independent thinker, not one could have articulated how they’d been brought around to share their boss’s exact vision while thinking it was their own. Her stories of past lives were so enchanting, so replete with fascinating details, no one could doubt them.
She was the charming and eloquent queen. Though they were merely pawns, she made them feel like bishops.
Les Trésors de Babette
Friday, May 10, 2013
Friday’s one-woman show at Les Trésors de Babette on Massachusetts Avenue in Indianapolis was mobbed from 6 pm when it opened to 9 pm when it closed. The exhibit, billed as Madeleine’s
Ode à la Mort
, had been heavily advertised and drew the curious and the morbid, clutches of students eager to mock art that people would actually buy, and throngs of sophisticated urban dwellers trolling for cheap prints and free wine. A dozen serious buyers and two free-lance reporters were also in attendance. Unfortunately,
The Indianapolis Star
did not send anyone; it had not had an art critic on staff in years. But one art critic from an influential magazine showed up.
Madeleine circulated enthusiastically. She ignored the grungy art students as best she could, focusing instead on the serious buyers with money and taste. She had no interest in discussing her techniques, her artistic philosophy, or her subject matter with students suffering from delusions of creativity.
Though she coveted the kind of publicity that guaranteed sales, she avoided the reporters because they knew almost nothing about art. They were there because of her peculiar relationship with one painting, that of Nicole Whitehead, a subject that could be sensationalized.
So the real focus of the artist’s mingling was the serious buyer, and there were, as always, very few of them. Only the comfortably rich could afford fifteen thousand a pop and only the loft-dwellers and mansion-owners had walls big enough to display the pictures as they should be displayed. Furthermore, only the most world-weary could bear to have one of her haunting subjects looking down upon them over dinner.
Madeleine’s subjects, at least to ordinary people, were very strange indeed. They were always people who were dead and they had names, real names. Some were famous personages who had died hundreds, even thousands, of years ago. Some, not famous at all, were people she once knew. When asked why she never painted living people, she said she didn’t want to steal their souls. Primitive people understood that, refusing to be photographed or painted. She respected the primitive sensibility. She did not work purely from imagination either. Real people provided all the inspiration she needed.
Madeleine’s unframed canvases were huge. Her style was called painterly, meaning her use of brushes and knives to manipulate the oil paint was obvious rather than concealed. The backgrounds were rendered in impasto swirls, blobs, and swipes of drab brown or gray or lavender, suggesting a fog or mist so palpable it seemed like a living thing. From the heavily textured fog or mist a smoothly painted human figure emerged like Lazarus coming back to life. Though haunted, most looked only slightly soiled by death. Their clothes were diaphanous drapes or shrouds. Their facial expressions, painted in a style reminiscent of Paul Cézanne’s, varied from faint bewilderment to surprise. Some looked resigned to their fate. No pet dog or homely object relieved the solitariness of the subject. Though the paintings were enough alike in theme and technique to be obviously the work of one artist, each included some distinctive element peculiar to the subject.
Sensitive viewers asked themselves, where had those haunted people been and where were they going now? What had they seen? Were the paintings about life or death? Was the viewer seeing the true character of the dead or not?
One of the visitors that night was a man dressed like the captain of a yacht, mysteriously appearing when she reached the painting called Nicole, Girl at the Dunes. The haunting picture was worthy of admiration, but the stranger seemed to be studying it as if seeing something no one else could see. Instead of emerging from fog or mist, the figure of Nicole appeared to be walking laboriously through roiling blue water. Her hair flowed upwards, like seaweed, around a heart-shaped face marked by a shadow -- a bruise? -- above frightened eyes. A shadowy shape wriggled from her left hand, perhaps a fish. Perhaps nothing. The viewer could not be sure.
The ship captain grabbed Madeleine’s wrist. “Isn’t that the girl who made you famous?”
“What?” she asked, pulling her arm away. She reluctantly leaned in to hear him better, though some instinct told her she would not like his words.
“The girl who made you famous twice. Once you tried to save her from drowning, then you brought her back from the grave with that reconstruction I saw in the paper.”
“Yes, it’s Nicole,” Madeleine said. “Her name, as you can see, is on the card beside the picture.”
“Nicole Whitehead, wasn’t it? The Dunes. The Fourth of July, 1990. I remember. ” The man’s voice was a hushed monotone. His eyes were flat like slate.
“You remember what?”
“I watched the two of you from a boat.”
Alarmed at his tone, which was faintly menacing, and at the approach of the reporters looking for a story, Madeleine frowned, massaging the spot where he had grabbed her arm. Without a word, she glided into the safety of the crowd.
After that, he followed a few feet behind as she moved from buyer to friend and back to buyer. Though he did not ask her questions or utter any comments, he appeared to be eavesdropping on every conversation she had.
As the exhibition drew to a close, Madeleine glanced around the room in search of Babette. She wanted to know how many paintings had been sold, how many people were in attendance, what kind of comments had been overheard. But Babette was nowhere to be seen and she wasn’t in her office.
And then, emerging from Babette’s office, Madeleine once again spotted the strange man slowly moving toward her. She quickly headed toward the temporary bar, where Anthony, dressed like a diplomat, was standing at attention, listening with a bemused expression to an art critic as famous for her eccentric costumes as for her erudite reviews. He flashed a smile at Madeleine. “Oh, my dear, you know Dr. Beatrice Eagleton, of course.”
Taking Anthony’s arm, Madeleine nodded at the androgynous figure with the prominent nose and pock-marked cheeks. Her gravelly baritone voice and big, bony feet clad in designer stilettos confused people who didn’t know her. Dr. Eagleton, who could make or break an artist, was due a great deal of deference, but Madeleine was too upset for niceties. She politely tipped her head in greeting but directed her words to Anthony. “Quick! Who’s the man who’s been following me all night?”
“What man?” Anthony and Beatrice asked in chorus. Both stretched and peered around.
“The man in the double-breasted navy blazer, looks like a ship captain. Spooky eyes. Speaks in a monotone. I think he’s right behind me.”
Anthony took a few steps to the side, swept the room with his eyes, and shook his head. “I don’t see anyone of that description.”
“Look again.”
Instead, he put his arms around Madeleine and leaned in so Beatrice could not hear. “Schatzi, you’re imagining things again.”
“No, I’m not,” she whispered. “I swear. You must have noticed him. About your height, longish white hair, deeply furrowed forehead burnt by the sun. For hours he’s followed me like a shadow.”
“Sorry, never noticed. If I’d known someone was bothering you, I’d have hurried to the rescue, you know that.” He gently took her shoulders and turned her around. “Look for yourself. Don’t be embarrassed. If some man is following you, then confront him.”
But the man had disappeared.
Anthony turned her around so she was once again facing the art critic. “Now our dear Beatrice has two questions for you. The first is whether your style is deliberately in imitation of Cézanne.”
Madeleine sighed, in no mood for more art talk but, if she had to play the game, grateful for the directness of the inquiry. Usually, Beatrice Eagleton, culture critic for a prominent art review magazine, asked some “deep” unanswerable question, like how the depicted space related to the plane of the canvas or why the ingratiating aspects of her early work had disappeared. How did an artist make the irrational sound rational or the accidental sound deliberate? How did an artist describe the mysterious vision that would not fade away until rendered in paint? Should an artist ever confess that her vision, once manifest on canvas, never satisfied even herself?
Though distracted by the mystery of the shadowy man, Madeleine gathered her thoughts sufficiently to satisfy the famous critic’s curiosity about Cézanne. “He’s my favorite artist. Have you ever seen his 1901 painting,
Pyramid of Skulls
?”
“Yes, when you were still a baby,” Dr. Eagleton said, visibly offended.
“Of course, you have. It was just a rhetorical question. Well, I visited Cézanne’s studio in a suburb of Aix-en-Provence last year. Did you know . . . well, I’m sure you do know! . . . that the skulls are still there. Anyway, that painting’s my favorite, but it’s his faces I like for my own work. Fluid but architectural.”
“Ah,” Dr. Eagleton breathed, smacking her lips with satisfaction while jotting the words “fluid” and “architectural” on a little notepad. She looked up to hear more.
“Cézanne’s a bridge between Impressionism and Cubism, at least in my book, so . . . .”
Dr. Eagleton frowned imperiously. “In your book perhaps. Not everybody would agree with that, but” -- jotting a few more lines on her notepad -- “it’s an interesting observation.” At last she’d heard something significant, something that could be the germ of an entire learned essay tying Madeleine Harrod to Paul Cézanne and the roots of post-Impressionism. “And why, my dear, did you paint Ivan the Terrible to look so saintly?”
Madeleine was startled, then chagrined. That answer would take a little more time, time she was no longer in a mood to spend on art. The fatigue and tension of the evening, the frightening apparition of the ship captain, had created an enormous appetite for something more privately stimulative.