Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

Ch. 8

106 8 THE ALBRIGHT-KNOX has always been my measure of a great art museum. It has a superb collection of art, mostly European and American paintings and sculptures, mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several acknowledged masterpieces (even New Yorkers are impressed), and it can be viewed in two hours or less, tops. It’s housed in a Greek revival building built during the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, joined with a severe but complementary Modernist black glass box addition built in 1962. Junior and Taylor were eager to see the O’Keefe retrospective. That made sense; it was 1986 and New York was in the heyday of its love of Santa Fe, a short-lived fling. The two mindsets are incompatible; hanging a cow skull on the wall of your apartment in Manhattan only triggers the impossible-to-extinguish fear that dead bones attract rats and roaches. Within a few years, my—and everyone else’s—Hopi silver bolo ties and hand-forged wrought-iron demitasse spoons ended up in storage units. “I’m going to look around while you check out Georgia,” my mother declared as she encouraged us to see what we wanted versus doing what we felt obligated to do—not abandoning her. Junior and 107 Taylor encouraged her to come with us, but she shook her head. “All those flowers and skulls.” She scrunched up her nose. “It’s like she’s trying to cheer me up about dying.” She flapped her hands as if she was fanning us up the staircase to the exhibit. “You go. I’ll be fine.” The remarkable thing is that she did want us to do what we wanted; her selflessness was tied to her often-professed credo: “If my kids are happy, I’m happy.” Still, spending time with her children made her happy, and I announced that I’d stay with her and told Junior and Taylor to go ahead. My mother gently patted her hair in anticipation of spending time with a friend of her son. As the boys ascended the staircase, we walked down a corridor to one of the main galleries and stopped in front of one of my favorite paintings—a wonderful self-portrait of the young Degas, looking haughty and yet also vulnerable. “Would it kill him to smile?” my mother asked as we gazed at his likeness. “He’s only twenty. I’ll bet he had bad teeth.” Suddenly, I imagined my mother recording an audio tour for the Albright. My mother liked art, but she had no reverence for the artistic, and her response to every painting was what every modern artist claimed to want, a fresh and unpremeditated viewing. “If I could steal one painting, it would be this one,” I said in front of Giacomo Balla’s futurist masterpiece, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. The painting is a foot-level view of a dachshund being walked, and the motion of the dog’s moving paws, the moving leash, and his mistress’s moving boots are painted in repeated sequences, suggesting action in a way that alluded to the relatively recent invention of motion pictures. Balla’s painting must have seemed radical at the time, but it also must have always been seen as incredibly charming. My mother grinned. “This is one of my favorites too. I look at it as a life lesson: Always Busy, Going Nowhere.” In front of Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey, my mother shook her head. “This one upsets me. The monkey’s eyebrows are less noticeable than hers.” As we moved on to Arshile Gorky’s The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, my mother ignored his masterwork and smiled at a guard who smiled back 108 at her. When we were out of earshot, she said, “It’s not artists who suffer for art but museum guards. Look at the one standing over there.” I gazed at the man she indicated. His face looked as if he’d been stifling a yawn for an eight-hour shift. “Imagine spending forty years staring at these walls,” she said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t burned the place down.” I laughed and she did also. “You’re right!” I said. “A truly sensitive person could never enjoy an art museum. The plight of the guards would be too upsetting.” “It’s better than assembling windshield...