The Manet

“What do you think of this painting by Manet?” I’m studying vibrant green stems visible through a cylindrical glass vase filled with luminous water. The stems are surmounted by a colorful bouquet of varying blooms on an almost grey background of oil paint tinted with lavender. The water seems to reflect an imagined late afternoon sunlight from behind my left shoulder. “Should I paint a still life like this, come up with a group of florals instead of abstracts? Because I can.”

“Dick, are you saying you can paint like Manet?”

Stefan and I are standing in the Getty Museum where they have mounted an astounding exhibition of paintings by Edouard Manet ranging from magnificent portraits and genre scenes to floral still life – I never spent a lot of time looking at works of Manet, and these paintings have come from museums across the world. I am mesmerized by Flowers in a Crystal Vase, about 1882, which is on loan from the National Gallery. We are in Los Angeles to visit Stefan’s sister, a feminist writer and art scholar who studied with Linda Nochlin at Vassar in the 1970s and she recommended this exhibition. As we stroll the rooms, frequently pausing with cautious intent, I’m filled with gratitude that she sent us into this shadowy darkness, a labyrinth of charcoal gallery walls which match the mood I’ve been in for the last year since my mother’s death, and the closing, yet again, of my third architectural office. These rooms of darkness, unlike those in my mind, are punctuated with gorgeously rendered colors on canvas that make my head spin with renewed enthusiasm for life – I’m sleepwalking through a dream from which I will awake with fistfuls of the fantastical. 

“Yes, a still life, yes, almost exactly, I can copy that. Not people. Flowers in a vase with water, transparent glass, absolutely. I was trained in architectural rendering. I had to paint photorealism – we did not have 3D computer modeling back then.”

“Honestly, I think your abstracts suck. I mean, I love you Dick, but some of those paintings are just terrible.” Stefan is perhaps the most honest of my lovers. 

I picture the pile of paintings that lean against the rough wooden rafters of what is now my ex-wife’s attic. I wrapped them all carefully in cardboard and labelled them with a Magic Marker. They look nothing like any Manet ever painted, I was experimenting with composition and color theory. Or maybe as Josef Albers said of his flat squares., I was painting emotion. How bad are they? Two had sold; in my mind I try to come up with an inventory of remaining titles and open my mouth in my defense, “OK. Fine, but when Laura and I were in Florida I got a show on Worth Avenue with my shitty paintings, so they cannot be all that bad.”

“That happened because you knew people. You had prominent clients.”

I’m trying to think how that show was brought about. Someone I knew called someone. Yet decision makers had to see my work and like it enough to think it would sell. My paintings are not spectacular, as a body of work they lack distinction – I heard it more than once. 

“I have been thinking of taking a break from architecture – it’s feeling tedious, I cannot seem to concentrate on important details.”

“Well then. I’m glad you’re doing bluestone terraces and butler’s pantries for indolent socialites and not designing suspension bridges for the nation.”  

Stefan has a way of making a joke that is cutting, I don’t think he means to be hurtful, but there’s often a perceptible edge. Oh, he’s adorable everyone says, women love him, he looks like James Dean and this is somewhat true – if Dean had lived twenty-five more years perhaps; I look at him and try to use my imagination, straining my addled brain to morph those famous 1954 Dennis Stock photos to middle age. At least I can talk to Stefan about things we both understand. If I mention Linda Nochlin or Dennis Stock he doesn’t look at me blankly – but he doesn’t wear his knowledge on his sleeve. Stefan’s older sister is an aesthete, an intellectual and a Nochlin groupie: she often quotes the master art historian. Yesterday, as we talked about our families and her art, and about my own hardships and downward mobility, she pulls out her  Nochlin Reader, flips to “Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists” and reads. “Those who have privileges inevitably hold on to them, and hold tight, no matter how marginal the advantage involved, until compelled to bow to superior power of one sort or another.” 

I’ve been thinking of painting again, but in a different way. I remember once saying to my mother that my failures in life stemmed from our family insistence on striving for perfection. 

“You’re wrong,” she said. “We never strive for perfection; we strive for excellence.” 

If I start to paint again, I am going to look at everything differently. I‘d never thought of florals, they seem to belong to my grandmother’s generation; she had a huge impressionistic painting of flowers over her mantel. It was an elegant painting from the 1940s with forceful brushstrokes of impasto – painting florals seems a bit like “women’s work” and I wonder for the first time if it was painted by a woman or a man. Behind her shingled house there were masses of old floribunda roses which my mother saved and transplanted when my grandmother died and the house was sold.  She moved them to her own beautiful backyard gardens, and, later, after my father died, she moved them again and planted them in the only space she could find, a tiny bit of soil near the rows of garage doors behind our brick apartment building. I told her this was a foolish waste of time – but in spite of every inhospitable element, she coaxed them to bloom. 

“I was thinking of making purely decorative art – bang out acrylic paintings with a mid-century vibe, a sort of Bernard Buffet rip-off cityscape series. I think there might be a market online, on a website. It doesn’t have to be important, Stefan, it doesn’t have to go into a gallery.” 

“Are you interested in making art or just branding a product?”

“I’m interested in taking in some money” I have done more than enough of art for art’s sake. not to mention the number of projects for which I was seriously under-paid — and for which I got no credit.

“Change is good. Let’s face it. There’s no glory in architectural design unless you have gigantic budgets, especially with interiors. And most of these rich people you’ve worked for, they believe they are doing it themselves — forget your years of art training, the lifetime preparation of analyzing aesthetics. When you complete a project, they have a big party – without you — to show it off and say, I did this all myself – it’s in my genes —  I don’t use a designer. They have no respect for talent, they only care about money.”

I think about this for a moment. I hate to admit that it’s true.

“Dick, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, I know you’re grieving your mom. But I also know what these so-called clients-slash-friends have done –  you feel rejected, but it is not about you.”

“Really?  It’s not about me? Who is it about then ? It certainly seems personal. No one even answers my emails.”

“They’re not your friends, Dick, they never were. Haven’t you read Gatsby? I don’t care how often you fly in their planes, camp out in their guest houses, or go to their parties. I don’t care if they buy you a Bentley for your birthday. They only want people like us when they need something. When you’ve outlived your usefulness they’ll turn their backs as if you’ve never existed.” 

“But –”  I’m searching for words but still thinking about the quote from Nochlin and the generational fragrance of floribunda roses. “I don’t understand why.” 

“Because they can, that’s why. That’s who they are. Stop asking stupid questions, it insults your intelligence.” 

The more we walk the more I’m longing for a bourbon, but drinking always makes me feel sick because I’m taking antidepressants. We’ve been circling through the galleries for almost three hours, and my stomach is grumbling for a snack. I’m certain we’re annoying some of the spectators as we speak; I was raised to have good manners. but after years of trying to follow rules I failed. When I tried to break rules with my wild quixotic abstracts, I failed again. I’m missing my indomitable mother now, I’m missing her beautiful border gardens and her well-trained roses, her many sets of inherited dishes, her endless shelves of books and the 134 pieces of framed art I had to remove from the walls of her apartment and pack. I’m thinking about the huge piles of yellowed papers she saved from my childhood, those were her real treasures – all the artwork I created before I’d articulated expectations of anything, when I crammed my dreams into drawings. Mostly I drew buildings with exceptional attention to detail – tiny windowpanes and stone lintels in three-dimensional faded pencil.  Sometimes I drew birthday cards or mother’s day cards with happy faces and loopy fingers grasping crayon bouquets of childish hope. 

“You know, I’m just thinking that when your mother is gone – I mean when a man’s mother dies – there’s no one left who will always believe in everything he dreams.”

Stefan grows quiet as we move full circle through the rooms and come back to stand in front of Flowers in a Crystal Vase, about 1882. 

“No one ever offered to buy me a Bentley,” I say, “I’d be happy today with cab fare.”

“C’est n’est pas une pipe.” He’s looking at the walls of art. 

 “A rose is a rose is a rose.” I respond and tilt slightly left to touch my shoulder to his, then heave an audible sigh. We’re both looking at the nuanced fragility of pink floribunda petals bending over the edge of the transparent vase. “To recapitulate, what is your feeling about this Manet? Should I start painting again?” 

“Dick, if you are arrogant enough to place your talent for painting in the same category as Manet — what the hell, man —  then do it.”

“You doubt my word?”

He shrugs. “Then prove me wrong. Because you can.”

Harrison Morris had a long early career in entertainment marketing. At 40, he segued into interior design. In what he describes as an “existentially life-altering” workshop at FAWC Provincetown, he worked with the poet Marie Howe, who urged him to have a literary career; he began writing short fiction and memoir while working in design. Now, in his sixth decade he is finishing his first novel. He holds a BA in Art History from SUNY New Paltz, and is pursuing an
ALM in Literature and Creative Writing at Harvard Extension School.