Untitled (Girl)

You think summers in New York are humid now, but this is nothing compared to 1983. That year the air was full of heavy metals. Headless bodies in topless bars, the first AIDS vigil, candle flames seizing in a night that felt like wet fleece. When de Kooning’s Seated Woman got up and walked away from the Seagram Building, you got the sense something really dangerous was loose in our sweltering soup, our Manhattan.

July 27, 1983: Untitled (Girl) stands alone on Seventh Street staring at a dim reflection of herself. She is a work of mid-1950s figurative surrealism. You might expect languorous grace (such as: a melted clock sliding down a wall, such as: a skeleton curling to pick up a seashell), but her movements are jerky and disconnected, each one a separate act of defiance. She woke up one morning on the unswept floor of some Lower East Side gallery, having grown overnight the ungainly body of an adult woman; she’s only had eighteen months to get used to it. So, there’s one explanation. She is undervalued, the creation of a frustrated portrait artist whose point of view critics never seemed to grasp. So, there’s another. But I have seen other paintings who move like that, even famous ones, even ones who have been awake for decades. Could it be a reaction to those prebodied years of stillness, being looked at hard from all angles? Basically, are they self-conscious? Maybe I’m wrong, but you don’t see the Yellow Pages acting so stiff. Maybe it is something else, running through her like a raw nerve, that causes impatience to flare as she adjusts her frame in the plate glass, in the relentless summer humidity that is so bad for oil paintings. She yanks, and cracks erupt in her sidewalk.

The frame is new: Chinese padauk, the color evocative of iron-rich soil, therefore strength. Untitled (Girl) is attracted to the color, the smell, to any whiff of strength. She doesn’t know it, but she tracks strength like a hound. Her stomach feels like it’s been dunked in paint stripper when she thinks about how much she paid for the frame. It was for the interview, an investment. She wanted to look her best. She wanted to look as though she didn’t need the job but would take it if it interested her.

And now there are these cracks. She takes a pot of mastic jelly out of her purse and dabs some on. It does nothing but make her finger slick, then sticky, then stiff, leaving gray crumbstreaks of paint. The office is right through the door. She places her hand on the door.

She walks on.

1983: It’s a few years since works of art began showing a tendency to come to life. We’re past the very earliest days, when paintings were paraded through galleries like newborn deer, docents in the background trying to make sure they stayed in line and didn’t trip over each other. The walkouts have happened, the protests. You might remember some of the headlines: emancipation filings and insurance disputes, talk of unionizing, although that never came to much. Most former museum paintings don’t want to make a living on display. And there is no going back. By 1983 art is coming to your friend’s dinner party or standing in line behind you at the supermarket to buy bags of kitty litter. By 1983 you’re trying to muster the courage to talk to that dark windswept landscape at the bus stop and chickening out. We’re in the honeymoon period—no one has considered, yet, the problems involved in the restoration of living paintings.

After her aborted job interview, Untitled (Girl) meets a friend at a bar on Second Avenue and Fifth. She leans in so Still Life With Monstera can see the cracks.

They’re not too bad, Still Life tells her, but Untitled (Girl) snaps back that it’s only the lighting. Outside, they glare. The bar is dark with the furry obscuring yellow of beer signs, deserted in the early evening. Untitled (Girl) lights a cigarette and watches the orange glow creep toward her fingers. Smoking isn’t good for paintings, says Still Life.

Still Life With Monstera is from Canada. There’s a refreshingly tame air about her, in the naivete of her green brushstrokes, in her mass-produced beige slacks, the unapologetic curiosity of a tourist. She lives with the artist who painted her and talks about him a lot, maybe too much. She wanted to see more of the world, and he bought her a plane ticket. She is more straightforward than the art Untitled (Girl) usually runs around with. They tend to be experimental. Color fields. Motion paintings. Untitled (Girl) tells herself that Still Life With Monstera is a bore. At the same time, she feels relief; around her she doesn’t have to pose, push herself to certain limits. Her new frame is starting to pinch.

Still Life would like to hear more about the interview. Untitled (Girl) doesn’t know. She wasn’t paying close attention. They probably only asked her to come in out of curiosity anyway; it’s not like she has any experience. She laughs to give the impression that that was the reason she applied for the job in the first place—curiosity.

What does she mean? Again, Untitled (Girl) doesn’t know; she never knows what she really means; she’s not that kind of piece. She’s up for interpretation. Dull, dull, dull, she thinks. Her other friends would have been talking about something more interesting by now.

As though she has conjured them up to rescue her from the conversation, a whole exhibition comes into the bar. A couple are paintings Untitled (Girl) has never seen before. One is a metal sculpture of a goat. They order the cheapest wine; it’s not like they’re going to drink it, but they propose toasts, wet their fingertips, rub the rims of their glasses. Some of them smoke. Still Life With Monstera fades into the background.

Someone slides onto the stool next to Untitled (Girl): silvery tubes, postmodern text, an abstract. An acrylic. He asks if she’s having a good night. She reaches into her purse for another cigarette. He takes out a lighter and cups her hands in his.

Fair, she tells him. She knows how to be cool.

He tells her about the opening they’ve just crashed, trying to wake up the art. The Gondoliers sang opera. They were chased out by security guards.

Sounds like a scream, she says. His wool sweater retains the late afternoon smells of the street: muggy air, rotten fruit, cooling tar, and exhaust. Has she ever been to the Pier?

The Pier is an experiment. It’s all about life and meaning and maybe even reincarnation: past and future selves. It started when some homeless paintings broke into a derelict shipping depot. Now it’s an artists’ collective, and they are the artists. They call it the next generation. New York’s human critics come to watch; they go back to their lofts and write articles and essays about whether art can create new art, whether it is all a refraction of the original human artist’s vision. A new type of automatic creation. Untitled (Girl) hasn’t been there yet, but she’s heard about it. The truth is, she doesn’t want to go.

The acrylic is saying that she has an interesting texture. What’s his name again? Untitled (Girl) tries to remember. Something vague and European, like Les Gosses or La Guerra. He tells her it’s a shame she’s breaking down already, but that’s what happens with these soft oils.

Untitled (Girl) is shocked to realize she has another crack. This time it’s higher up, in her sky that looks like an ocean. It feels big, yawning, like it might swallow her finger whole if she tries to touch. The acrylic is saying that it’s brave of her, walking around like that, not caring what anybody thinks. Cheers to her.

He holds up his wineglass. Reeling, she has to hold hers up too.

When she leaves with him, she notices that Still Life With Monstera is there, sitting motionless in the corner of the bar. She waves as she slips out the door.

Untitled (Girl) got herself appraised once for fun. She knows it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like a horoscope: for entertainment purposes only.

BARSTOW BARSTENIUS(1923–1965)
UNTITLED (GIRL)
CIRCA 1954
Oil on canvas

She has no real memory of Barstenius. He feels like a peduncle growing out of her: she is the root and he is the fruiting body. Very white and nearly faceless, leaning away from the natural sunlight, only dipping his wrists in it to paint. Sometimes she dreams of a studio with rigid blinds, bisected by sharp shadow, and hands that treat painting like washing the dishes. A gluey frown. She feels like the source of it all. If there is an image, an artist must exist to paint it. Untitled (Girl) knows this is backward framing, that she is wrong, and she is searching for some concept to replace it, the nerve of her personhood quivering. Who is she, really? What is the girl doing on the sidewalk? These are the questions she wants answered, but the Valuation Summary focuses on Barstenius.

Subsequent to the sudden death of his mentor, the European Schools expected Barstow Barstenius to continue Hare’s tradition of fine portraiture. Instead, Barstenius exiled himself to New York City in 1953 and began churning out new work that emphasized texture and clashing styles: a theme seemingly of disconnect, especially as regards his previous subject matter.

Untitled (Girl) is typical of mid-50s Barstenius, the appraiser writes. She is something like a rebuke. An anti-portrait.

She is other things too, a showcase of Barstenius’s remarkable skill with texture. He mixed beeswax with oil paints to create the sky that looks like an ocean about to crash over the girl on the sidewalk. There is a whole paragraph about this. The troubled sky is a typical device of artists working in the Expressionist mode, says the appraiser, and perhaps indicates that Barstenius was more interested in the execution of these basic devices than he was in innovating subject matter within Expressionism. Her friends laugh at this line. They quote it sometimes, like an inside joke. Untitled (Girl) laughs too.

Compared to the sky, the girl is flat. She appears in several other paintings, always facing away, a stand-in for the children of the British nobility that Hare and Barstenius were busily documenting at the time of Hare’s death. Despite her urban surroundings, she is dressed in a white frock with a blue ribbon, knee-high socks, and a boater hat, attire more suited to an English country garden. She is holding the string handle of a wagon, into which have been tossed a number of toy soldiers in the red coats and black bearskins of the Queen’s Guard. The girl and her toys are hyper-representational, precisely the training Barstenius was in the process of rejecting. Each piece of the girl seems to have its own intense, perlustrating sun, under which the finest details are laid bare: the satin sheen on the ribbon; the faintly fuzzy character of the white dress; the rough, bristling bearskin hats on the soldiers contrasted with the glass-like varnish on their blank faces; the unsanded grain of the wooden wagon. Her hair is a golden mirror of the turmoil in the sky above. The sidewalk has been given relatively minor attention by the artist and appears almost unfinished—also not atypical of his work during this period, which strives, in a strident, aggressive mode, to a lack of visual wholeness.

In other words, Barstow Barstenius should have stayed in England and stuck to portraits. That is the general opinion of art critics. It isn’t Untitled (Girl)’s quarrel with the appraiser. That’s the other sheet, clipped onto the Valuation Summary, handwritten in soft pencil.

Like the man who painted you, your inner self is full of harsh juxtapositions. Although Expressionist paintings are outgoing by nature, your highly representational Surrealist elements temper this characteristic. People will be confused the first time they look at you—trying to make sense of the wildly differing styles of the girl, the sky, and the sidewalk—and you will have the tendency to hold them at arm’s length. Although you can be aloof, there is a charming, somewhat passive delicateness at your core that is easily seen and will come out when you are comfortable, in small groups of people you know well. While I believe you would thrive in situations that allow you to connect with others, unfortunately the clash in your nature may hold you back and cause you to become lonely.

Who is this anonymous appraiser, anyway, who thinks they know Untitled (Girl) just by looking at her, who doesn’t sign their work? Some la-di-da MFA candidate who sits around all day and picks apart dead paintings but never talks to living ones. Untitled (Girl) is never lonely. She has a gallery’s worth of friends, and they are all the most interesting people. There is no charm or delicateness at her core, despite the little girl’s satin ribbon and boater hat. The rough sky is her best feature. Her texture, the great spikiness.

July 28, 1983: Untitled (Girl) stands alone in a phone booth as hot as a deep fryer, admiring the cartoon ads in the Yellow Pages: the cool shadowed silhouette of a giant key, the deli-meat-filled cornucopia, the brunette Marilyn Monroe getting her skirt blown up by an air conditioner. Two art restoration firms are listed. Neither of them is anything but a square box with plain text, dignified but nearly invisible. Someone has scrawled over them in blue pen: Need a QUICK FIX? Come to Pier 43. Or this could happen to YOU. Underneath there is a doodle of a man operating a hot vacuum table, stretching new canvas over the back of an older painting. The painting appears to be in distress, bent over and pinned by the man’s large body. A speech bubble is telling her, Hold still, angel, and we’ll preserve that pretty face of yours.

The piers. Do I have to put them in context for you? Maybe you can imagine them. Not in black and white. Put your phone down. I see you trying to crib, doing an image search for Alvin Baltrop. Yes, gay sexuality flowered here. The artists and the outcast and the art. Yes, it was a wasteland. A grand, crumbling honeycomb of raw industrial space and flat concrete and trash-choked water. Yes, there were muggings, murders. Bodies pulled from the Hudson. But the piers were beautiful, and never in a grayscale way.

August 4, 1983: Blue sky. Not the kind of blue that hits the back of your eyes and stays there, glowing. Baby-blanket blue, and fresh, because here the gross, leaden humidity is cut by the river. Clouds. Untitled (Girl) is always catching parts of clouds, from the sidewalks covered by awnings, under tall buildings. Now she sees cloud after cloud; she sees that they move across the sky as though towed. Some of them are sharply rendered, their every curl and mound; others look like they have been smudged out by a dissatisfied thumb.

She sees algae-stained structures, giant legs sinking into the water, green and rust brown. Jutting wires and broken cables. She sees bodies out to sunbathe. Wild pubic hair. Cheap makeup, rayon slipping off shoulders. She sees congeries of graffiti: balloon letters, Hellenic satyrs with Ray-Ban sunglasses and dicks the size of canoes, love, danger, birth, death all around. A drug, that’s what Baltrop called the piers.

Warnings are everywhere. Get It Together, Man. Watch Yourself. Keep A Hand On Your Wallet. Across the shipping depot at Pier 43: Danger Live Art.

That’s me, she thinks. She holds her purse securely in both hands.

So much activity and movement inside, she is momentarily blinded. She feels a tap on her shoulder.

Who exactly is she, asks an icon of Mary and Baby Jesus in a gilt frame. There are syringes hanging from Mary’s arm, and the canvas is slashed with a line of yellow spray paint; the paint has dripped into Baby Jesus’s eyes and makes him look like he is crying Gatorade.

Sarah, says Untitled (Girl). She isn’t sure why Sarah. It just comes to her. Maybe people will think the English country girl is named Sarah. They’ll think there’s something knowable about her. That there’s a point to her.

The icon is called Hod, short for Hodegetria. Copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a . . . Does she want a smoke?

Sarah shrugs.

Does she have any cigarettes? Marlboro, or Salem . . .

She’s got Virginia Slims.

He’ll take a Virginia Slim.

They light up together. Hod is short, and Sarah feels the smoke from his cigarette wafting over her canvas. It’s good. Dry and warm. In the back of her mind, she hears Still Life With Monstera tell her that smoking is unhealthy.

She asks Hod what he does here. Lives here, mostly, helping out the artists, he means the art that’s doing art. He helped with those papier-mâché heads over there on those zombies, unfinished human forms with gaping eyes and pulpy mouths. He goes around and shouts at the art to wake up. Does she know about that? Jeannette says it’s bound to happen soon. Then they will all be famous. Is she, Sarah, an artist?

Sarah is about to say no, but she tilts her strong red-brown frame and instead says that she doesn’t know. Maybe someday. She came to get herself fixed. See? She’s cracking.

Hod nods; the crying Baby Jesus nods. Price of being alive. If Sarah follows him, he’ll ask Jeannette to have a look.

He takes Sarah by the hand and leads her up some steps, where the zombies are getting their heads covered with black garbage bags. Sunlight pours through broken windows onto the massive bare floor of the depot. Muralists work directly on the walls, on the floor. There is a ghost in the corner, hanging on a thread, slowly turning, its arms spread wide under a white sheet.

Sarah says she hopes that one will come to life. They go up to it and start yelling. Hod jumps around like a possessed child in a movie.

Has it ever actually worked? Hod doesn’t think so, but it’s always worth a try.

Sarah sees an Arts and Crafts vase full of limp weed flowers trying to paint something like a still life. A human woman is watching him. Her hair, Sarah understands immediately, is a wig. Her bare limbs are long and graceful.

Another restoration. Hod’s words float, caught in the sunlight as Jeannette turns around. Her face is paler than her neck. Her eyelids are electric green. She stares at Sarah with no curiosity and no disorientation.

One of these days, Jeannette says, it was understood. One of these days she was going to see one of them walking around. She didn’t think it would be Untitled (Girl). What’s that? Sarah, okay. Sarah. She’s not exactly original. Despite the fancy frame, which looks ridiculous, in Jeannette’s opinion. There were others Jeannette was expecting to see. Bee Crucifixion. Manhood. Boy With Rose. She sat for that one. That was her. Well, mostly her. She was one of a couple boys with roses. Her voice moves like honey. It comes out slowly, as if eventually it will coat everything. She speaks in phrases that sound like song lyrics.

Sarah does not know how to encounter such majesty. She tilts her frame down and follows Jeannette to a broken metal cabinet full of supplies.

Jeannette sees that Sarah has tried to varnish herself. She burrows in the cabinet and gets brushes, cotton swabs, two brown bottles.

Here’s what she is going to do, she tells Sarah, while she’s moistening a cotton swab. Clean the surface of Sarah’s paint, brush PVA resin into the cracks, hold the damaged surfaces together with her fingers until they dry. Lastly an all-over coat of high-quality varnish. It’s easy; it won’t hurt. But she will have to get close.

Sarah nods, her cracked sky swimming forward.

Jeannette steps up, and Sarah can feel her soft puffs of breath, warm, dry, good as smoke.

Twenty-nine years since she watched from the shadows as he dipped his freckled English wrists into the sunlight and shouted at her to bring the wax. She saw him paint where he was weeping the night before. She was there for the two others in the same week. The girl outside a tenement. The girl in a room full of plants. Jeannette liked the one with the plants better. It was brighter, less sloppy around the edges. Yes, yes, he’s dead and Sarah is fine art now, but still. Can’t deny the wavering edge of the sidewalk, or the primed canvas that shows through the fence in the corner. Can’t deny the ambivalence. Jeannette wants to know how old Sarah is. When did she wake up?

Sarah tells her it’s been a year and a half.

Only that? Jeannette raises her eyebrows, which Sarah can now see are little artworks themselves. Sarah could stand to take better care of herself, all this smoke and sun damage. They’re such mysteries, these double-aged paintings. Look at Hodegetria, Jeannette whispers, dabbing at Sarah with cotton. He’s old as fuck, and he just woke up three weeks ago. Which makes him both older and younger than anybody. Is Sarah happy with her life? That’s another question. The other half of the transaction.

Sarah would like to tell Jeannette everything, about the Valuation Summary, the missed job interview, but she’s nervous. She falls back on habit in the face of the strength she’s been hounding and relaxes her shoulders into the languid folding willowy pose she uses with her friends. Life? She thinks it’s great. So cool.

Gimme a break, Jeannette says. Everyone’s unhappy.

Now Sarah has to ask. It’s a stupid question, she realizes, as the words come out of her mouth. Anyone can look at her sky and see.

Yes, Jeannette answers, he was very depressed. She is being extra careful as she cleans the little girl and her soldiers. Nearly tender.

Because of the girl? Sarah wonders. A specific girl, a real girl?

The thing is, nobody knows. Barstow started as a house painter, Jeannette tells her. He wanted to paint other things, anything but blank walls, but he had to make money. He would have liked to starve for art, but he absolutely had to make some money. The story goes: he was hired to paint Alexander Hare’s house, and two days later Hare had a new apprentice. Did he notice the way Barstow held his brush, did he see how carefully he took the corners? Was there some genius in the tilt of his wrist? The story goes: at around the same time, Hare and his wife, previously childless, adopted an infant girl.

The girl?

Well, Barstow liked to hint at darkness. Sometimes he said one thing and sometimes something else. Whatever sounded good and lurid, whatever mood he was in.

What does Jeannette think?

That he stopped painting the girl eventually. Jeannette doesn’t see what it has to do with Sarah. A painting of an elephant doesn’t have to know what an elephant is, and doesn’t have to care. Look at Hodegetria.

She finishes with the cotton swabs and takes out a brush. With practiced hands, she applies her resin to the cracks on Sarah’s canvas and then gently brings the broken paint against itself between her bare fingers. She tilts her head and presses a soft kiss to the bristling sky. Her lips are ripe, effective, touching the bare nerve that runs through Sarah. Sarah’s never reached heights of physical ecstasy before, although she’s heard about them. She wonders if this is it: feeling replanted, as though the roots of you were being scooped out and cradled, contact that takes your breath away; is breathing even something her body does? It’s nice, but a little too much. She can’t tell if it’s hello or goodbye, or who it’s really for.

Sarah’s surface is knitted back together with polymers. The final varnish is applied, setting everything. Jeannette warns her that her canvas will need to be lined eventually and that it will probably be painful.

Did she love him? asks Sarah, all of a sudden.

Jeannette smiles, her green eye shadow glowing like radioactive substances discovered by white-coated scientists in pulp serials, like ectoplasm, like ugly fish in the deepest ocean. She’s glad Sarah came by. Will she stay for a while?

Sarah wants to but doesn’t think she can. She picks up her purse and walks back through the depot, the enclave of live art, the flooded cavity in the wilderness. Hod follows her out. He tells her to come back soon. Some of the next generation is about to wake up. Maybe the papier-mâché zombies. Maybe the ghost.

He was not wrong, as you probably recall, even if you weren’t living in New York at the time. It was national news when the shipping depot at Pier 43, muraled inside and out, bellied into the river and swam out to sea. Witnesses claimed there was a rooftop party going on. The thing, concrete and steel, slowly made its way to the Atlantic, music blasting until the generators ran out, wine flowing until the wine ran out.

August 4, 1983: Sarah takes the subway back uptown. Half the car is full of something heavy and melted and black, which could be Seated Woman. Animate Yellow Pages cling to her drooping legs like tired children. Sarah turns to the window, searching the reflection of herself for the absence of cracks, and ignores this big intrusion, this irritating flapping.

She finds a postcard in her mailbox. No one has ever sent her a postcard. Sarah’s friends never leave Manhattan, and if they did, they wouldn’t send a postcard, and if they did, it wouldn’t be a real postcard; it would be a joke about people who send postcards. This one is real. Dear Untitled, it says, I’m done with New York. If you don’t get the job and you need a change of scenery, come find me. Your friend, Still Life With Monstera.

She flips it over and there’s a photograph of Niagara Falls: not the typical panoramic view with faraway sheets spilling into the river, panes of water hanging like portraits in a gallery, but an extreme side angle from some precarious perch right at the top, THE BEGUILING FALLS. Close up, they look alive, dark and curved and smooth as the back of some large sea mammal. Sarah can almost see movement. She imagines herself bobbing in tight circles as she hears the roar of the falls getting louder. The first painting to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Her canvas would be soaked, the oils smearing running dissolving, girl erased forever, her sky become soft blue lumps. She wonders what it would feel like, that much wetness, Still Life’s fingers running over the leftover wax, over and over it.

Does the monstera plant have any texture? Sarah suspects that it does. She thinks there are tiny green veins running through the shiny leaf; she thinks they would prickle, and maybe even burn. She thinks about a hotel room. Would they stay up late, varnishing each other? Is Still Life going to go back to her artist in Toronto when she runs out of money?

Sarah is exhausted now. She hangs up her purse and takes the postcard with her to bed. She slides it under her mattress next to the Valuation Summary that claims she has a delicate and passive core. She waits to fall asleep, waits for morning to come so she can find out if she wakes up and buys a train ticket, find out what her name is tomorrow, find out if she came of things or if things come of her.

Read more from Issue 20.2.