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M A R C J . S H E E H A N A Note on Rejection When I first fell in love with my ex-wife I’d take the Amtrak train to Chicago and must have passed the same backyards that Tunis Ponsen spent his whole life painting, though it’s hard to stay in love with something for that long. The broken-fenced back alleys of tenements’ only beauty is the beauty of someone who’s said, to hell with it, this is who I am. And that’s not who I was back in ’78, ten years after Tunis Ponsen died largely ignored after early success, maybe because his subjects were too modest. Now his paintings have come out of basements, and a gallery show reminds me how the slate-gray waves of Lake Michigan made the best melancholy background for walking to Union Station for those Sunday trips home. In his last self-portrait Ponsen painted himself without any background at all. He could be a brown-suited salesman, an insurance exec or actuarial. His painting of a cigarette left burning beside an airmail delivery letter on a windowsill overlooking rain makes even the least attentive Sunday art lover here for hors d’oeuvres stop and look. Is love contained in that letter, or loss? Ponsen crafted his palette carefully to The 2000s ❚ 265 capture the balance of these two people below his window walking away from each other in that gray rain. Maybe fame ain’t so great; you don’t know how many years of it you’ll have—whereas love and loss are for forever, or at least your part of it. 266 ❚ The 2000s ...

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