The Angelus

3 6 Y T H E A N G E L U S N A N Z . D A Sometime in 1945, Salvador Dalí paid a visit to the Barnes Foundation , then located on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and stood transfixed in front of a painting by Henri Matisse called Madras Rouge. Alfred Barnes was immensely proud of this acquisition and was keen to show it to Dalí. But Dalí wasn’t looking at the Madras, our docent told us. Instead, he was staring at the piece hanging above it, a very small and relatively unknown painting by the underappreciated twentieth-century French painter Jean Hugo called The Beginning of the End of the World. Something about it had set Dalí on fire. My father was with me at the time. ‘‘Dalí,’’ he said, ‘‘was a real genius. He could see beneath paintings. Beneath the paint.’’ But my father wasn’t talking about The Beginning of the End of the World. He was referring to something else. This is a story about art history that begins in another place. In 1988, exactly a year before the Tiananmen Square massacres, six American women artists from di√erent parts of the United States had responded separately to an advertisement in a crafting magazine for an artistic tour of China. That same year the Nobel laure- 3 7 R ate Liu Xiaobo had left the United States to return to the nationwide student demonstrations in China, forfeiting a visiting scholarship at Columbia University that would certainly have led to a charmed and well-appointed life. He was incarcerated shortly thereafter and lived exactly long enough to see that the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s that people regarded as a run-up to a reform was actually only the briefest of respites. All those years of thinking that social changes in China prefigured a more perfect political reform was simply the amount of time it took for the machinery of propaganda and censorship to wait out living memory, and for those who knew better to die. I have always tried to connect our family history to the events that transpired in China in 1989, to make use of that grander backdrop, but this is in some sense deeply fraudulent. My parents participated marginally in the student uprisings, and I was only three at the time. When Liu Xiaobo was coming back, we were leaving. After the massacres not just in Beijing but all over China, most of the foreigners who had planned trips to China thought better of coming. These six women happened to be stubborn and wilful; they refused to cancel their flights and so arrived in China later that summer and, by pure blind luck, met my family. They were assigned by the foreign relations o≈ce to the dormitory in Hangzhou College (since then incorporated into Zhejiang University ), where they struggled with breakfasts, bicycles, and the communal bathrooms. They desperately needed a translator, and my father was summoned, despite having multiple citations for his ‘‘thought problems,’’ because the o≈cials couldn’t find anyone else who spoke English so fluently. Sometimes you are shown something, and it goes right to your heart like poison. It was like this with my father and art history, and with the women and my father. My father could see things and then get you to see them, too – the thereness of it unthinkable a moment before but unmistakable once he’d walked you through it. They asked him about paintings and, realizing that he had a knack for art criticism, encouraged him to come study art history in the United States, where they’d pay for his tuition, basic necessities , and the cost of travel for his wife and daughter. He took them up on their o√er with the special exhilaration that comes from being chosen for talents that are almost invisible on the 3 8 D A Y outside. He would spend the next thirty years studying paintings he had never seen except in a few poor reproductions – by Gainsborough , Constable, Joseph Wright of Derby, Claude Lorraine – and writing a book he eventually had to self-publish on...