The Materpiece

THE MASTERPIECE

“I suppose I owe you an explanation,” I said, knowing that I couldn’t put it off any longer.

“From my best student? Yes, Mr. Pierce, with only your orals to go—eh, eh,” he coughed, “you owe me no less.”

He sat stiffly in his chair, his head cocked to the right. As freshmen, we used to mimic his emphatic cough, which he used to punctuate and highlight his discourse. It made him fair game.

I remembered when I first decided that I liked him. He was late for class. I took the opportunity to imitate him. “Eh, eh, Mr. ah Richard Briggs? You would perhaps like to edify us with your explication of Wöfflin’s theory about the painterly in architecture. Eh, eh, in say the Baroque.”

Everyone laughed. My accent wasn't quite right, but no one could do his little cough as well. “Eh, eh, Mr. Richard Briggs?”

“You never told us to read that far in the Wöfflin.” Dick went along with the routine. “I—”

“Mr. Briggs, eh, eh, do you have to read the cafeteria's hours to know that it's time for breakfast? Ah, Miss Janet Elliott, could you please, eh, eh, help Mr. Briggs?”

“Eh, eh, Mr. Alexander Pierce.” I heard from behind me. Dr. Richter must had heard the whole thing.

“That was almost very good. Eh, eh. There have been one, or two, students before you whose timing was better. But for a freshman, eh, eh, it was quite laudable. Eh, eh.”

“I—”

“No, no, Mr. Alexander Pierce, I enjoy a good laugh as well as the next. You will work on your timing? No?”

I was stunned. I could feel the red creep up past my shirt collar and burn my face.

“Today we will look into drawing styles, speaking of Professor Wöfflin, eh, eh. Perhaps Mr. Pierce would demonstrate?”

Dr. Richter pulled the easel away from the wall. He handed me a black marker. “Would you show us how Matisse would have sketched the desk and table, eh, eh, Mr. Pierce.”

I thought of myself as a painter, but I hated drawing. My entire schedule had been designed to avoid drawing classes, to avoid drawing. This was unheard of.

“Mr. Alexander Pierce?”

I couldn’t move. He took the marker from me and quickly made the sketch. Within seconds he had drawn a Matisse.

“Eh, eh, Mr. Pierce?” He turned towards us. “Fuseli?”

He ripped the paper off, and began a sketch in the style of Fuseli. “The Magic Marker was not Fuseli’s stock in trade, eh, eh, but it will have to do.”

No sooner had he finished it, than he showed us Seghers, Dürer, Leonardo, and Beccafumi. “The differences between these last two are not so great at first glance, but the differences tell us a lot. Mr. Pierce, eh, eh, you would like to continue your impersonation?”

“Mr. Pierce? Mr. Pierce?”

The dust from his books made me sneeze; I always sneezed in his office.

“Mr. Pierce? You were about to explain your new philosophy of life to me, eh, eh.”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about—”

“Please, don’t use nostalgia to ease your struggle. I am not susceptible.”

How could I tell him the entire truth—the fraud of his profession?

“It’s because of something that happened at Winchester and Reynold’s.”

“A petty squabble?”

“No. No, this had to do with the criteria aesthetic judgment.”

I told Dr. Richter about the job. For the first few months I listed the contents of crates, shipped in for the bimonthly auction. After I had gotten to know the people and the system there, I was assigned to work with the research staff. I ran errands, mostly looking things up in their library. There were twenty-three Ph.D.’s in art history, and four of us interns. We called ourselves roaches, because of all the crawling around we had to do, looking through catalogues and auction records.

“About six weeks ago we got in the Krebs estate. Rudolph Krebs. Mostly china and silver. There were a few choice pieces. He had a Braque, with a note from Braque to Tanguy taped to the back. There were some drawings by Brancusi, a small pen and ink by Dali, and boxes of notes and letters, correspondences with a variety of artists. The big items were removed immediately. They gave me all the rest to sort through.

“My second day at it, I found a dozen loose-leaf notebooks. They were Krebs’s notes. Do you know his name?”

Dr. Richter went to his five by seven card files. He must have had tens of thousands of cards, each with an artist’s name or the name of a work of art. “Krebs, ah, Julian, no, no, must be twentieth century. Here, Rudolph, born 1903. I assume he died this year?”

“Yes, in October.”

Dr. Richter updated the card. “He was a friend of several of the surrealists, for a few years . . . Spent some time in Europe . . . I’ve got references to him from Arp, Breton, and Tanguy. Later from Gottlieb and Rothko . . . Breton spoke quite highly of him. Nothing else. He was an artist?”

“That’s just it. No one at Winchester and Reynold’s thought so. Not even as a hobby. This was just a basic estate sale. But his notebooks were amazing. He discussed almost every book you had us read, and more, some of them I had never heard of. He analyzed not only the theories of art but the works of hundreds of artists. He couldn’t have written with as keen an understanding if he weren’t an artist.

“The last four notebooks discuss his own theories and work. There were sketches, in pencil, ink, and watercolor. He was good, I mean good.”

“And you found no paintings?” Dr. Richter had taken out a handful of cards and was culling through them.

“Not at first. But in one of the crates, the one they had thrown all of his personal papers and receipts in, was a six inch by five foot tube. There was a painting in it. It was his, it had his signature, and I recognized it from his sketches.”

Dr. Richter leaned back in his chair and removed his glasses. He polished them, slowly, looking at me with out-of-focus eyes. “Your story is getting interesting, eh, eh.”

“The painting was magnificent. The best I’ve seen. A masterpiece. I know you’re not fond of twentieth century art, but take my word for it, there’s nothing like it. According to his notebooks, he destroyed everything leading up to it.”

“How did your Mr. Rudolph Krebs support himself?”

“Inherited money. He didn’t have to work, and his talents lay in art. Apparently, he took some of Duchamp’s admonitions about propaganda too literally. After he finished it, and had destroyed everything else, he never painted again.

“I showed the work to my supervisor, Dr. Johns, a nineteenth century nut.” Dr. Richter gave me an look over the top of his glasses. “Sorry. But he was a little too crazy about the period. Anyway, he showed it to the three contemporary guys. They all loved it, really loved it. Suddenly everyone was interested in Rudolph Krebs. They called colleagues around the world. No one could tell them a thing about Krebs. You know more than they ever did.

“They set a base price of three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars! Can you believe it? It should have been millions. They said, ‘Who was Krebs? . . . He was a nobody. . . . Just luck.’ When they couldn’t make an unknown Krebs into a somebody, they turned their backs on him. I knew enough to not argue with them. I figured that I was a couple of weeks away from owning it, and if the price stayed around three hundred so much the better for me.”

“You bought this painting? Mr. Pierce? You bought it?”

I got up and walked to the window. Outside the snow was old and dirty. I hid my face from him.

“No. No I didn’t. My father died three days before the auction, I had to go home. I gave six hundred dollars to a work friend at Winchester and asked him to buy it. I said if it went higher to go for it, I’d reimburse him. While I was away, my friend talked to the experts, they convinced him that I was a fool to want a painting by an unknown, not for more than the base price.”

I sneezed, and sat down. “The auction went smoothly. But when they got to the painting a couple from upstate started bidding on it. My friend backed out at five hundred, he couldn't believe that I would have wanted it that much.

“When I got back, a week later, and heard the news I was crushed. I got the names of the couple and their address. I called them, hoping that they’d sell it back to me. I told them that I wanted to stop by and take care of some overlooked paperwork. After all, I didn’t want to sound excited.

“I drove up that afternoon. Mrs. Chase—the Hartford Chase’s she explained—met me at the door. We chatted for a while, just small talk. Finally, I asked about the Krebs. Mrs. Chase lit up, ‘So beautiful.’

“She asked if I wanted to see it. I said yes, and she led me into the kitchen.

“‘There’ she pointed to the table, ‘magnificent. I knew it would work. I knew it the second I saw it.’

“On the table . . . she had cut it into eight rectangles. The late afternoon sun flared off their glossy, laminated surfaces. ‘What have you done?’ I whispered.

“‘Place mats.’ She grinned.

Twenty-three Ph.D.’s, and god knows how many others, had been consulted. None of them had faith in their feelings; they liked it, but Krebs was a nobody, and feelings have no place in the world of academe. So a masterpiece was lost. Not one of them was sorry. Not one.

“And now, Mr. Pierce, that’s why you’re walking away from your doctorate?” Richter asked.

“Yes.” I hesitated, “It’s all a fraud. I don’t need any of it.”

“If we’re not prepared to accept the existence of a single, isolated, masterpiece, you, Mr. Pierce, are. And it is we who need you.”

“But—”

“Place mats, eh, eh.”