THE ARTIST'S MODEL
2018; Wiley; Volume: 106; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2018.0125
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
Resumo1 6 0 Y T H E A R T I S T ’ S M O D E L M A R Y G O R D O N ‘‘You owe it to me, you know. You couldn’t possibly deny you owe me something.’’ People were divided in their response to these words of Clara’s, because Marya had of course told the people she had expected to be on her side, not understanding that most people would not be, even the ones who knew that the Lichtmanns’ marriage was a horror, even the ones who were surprised that what had happened hadn’t happened much, much earlier. And even the people who liked Clara, who admired and enjoyed her, understood that she would have been impossible to live with and that Dan, who was eight years younger and had married her when he was just twenty-three, had been disastrously under her thumb for the twelve years of their married life. Nevertheless, the Lichtmanns had been a feature in the world of painters, sculptors, actors, and writers who had found Fort Greene while it was still a√ordable, and had somehow made something desirable out of what was considered a wasteland or an embarrassing lower-class cliché. They had ‘‘bonded,’’ as they liked to say of themselves, using air quotes when they said it, to hide the fact that they really believed that something united them, something real and valuable and as 1 6 1 R lasting as anything in the world they so tentatively inhabited could be. ‘‘What surprises me,’’ said Maribel, who was not an artist but was the head of a bilingual French-English day care center, ‘‘is that Clara didn’t see it coming a mile o√. That she took Marya to her bosom with such zeal, such misplaced enthusiasm.’’ ‘‘Childlessness,’’ said her husband, William, who worked in textile design. ‘‘I just don’t want to believe that. It’s too . . . essentializing.’’ ‘‘Believe it or not, my dear, the whole thing stinks to high heaven. And, to be perfectly cold about it, all of them have reaped what they sowed.’’ ‘‘I’m not sure that the three of them weren’t just naive, just a trio of absolute babes in the woods, lambs to the slaughter, or just a bunch of blind drunks, shitfaced on the rotgut of Clara’s high ideals.’’ ‘‘You cannot possibly think of Clara as an innocent. She was born knowing, born knowing everything she needed to know.’’ ‘‘I disagree with you on two points. First, she didn’t know enough to protect herself and her marriage from Marya. And second, whatever you think of her, she’s absolutely committed to the ideal of the pure artist, the absolute importance of the work of art. I call that a kind of innocence.’’ William didn’t know how to answer that, so he said, ‘‘I’m sick of the subject. It’s replaced the real estate conversation in our crowd, and that’s really quite something. How I’m longing for the days of discussion about the viability of garage space in Bed-Stuy!’’ The way the Lichtmanns and Marya had met was so ordinary as to be almost laughable. Marya had waited tables at the café that the Lichtmanns went to every day, starting their morning’s work, habitually, with double lattés and whatever scone was on o√er. Marya had arrived from nowhere, as all the girls who worked at the Bean and I seemed to have done. In her case, it was Toledo, and she seemed to take an outsize pride when Dan said that the museum in Toledo was really fine. Clara had become enthusiastic. ‘‘Where were we driving, sweetie, to Chicago – it was when I had a show there and we had to drive the paintings, or I guess we decided it would be cheaper and safer, and it sounded like fun, a road trip, and it was fun . . . but anyway 1 6 2 G O R D O N Y we stopped at Toledo, and we were so happy. It’s what we always do when we go to a new museum. We separate...
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