The Burnt Orange Heresy

"That isn't true! I've never known anyone like you before-"

"But then you've never been married, Berenice. And I'm talking about a widower who married again. His name doesn't matter to you, but it happened to be Dr. Hank Goldhagen. Anyway, his second wife, Claire, was also susceptible to respiratory infections. Sometimes, when they got into an argument, Hank would point to the urn of ashes, and say, 'My first wife, in that urn, is a better woman and a better wife to me than you are, right now!'

"What a terrible thing to say!"

"Isn't it?' I sometimes wonder what she said to him to provoke it. But the marriage didn't last long. Following a weekend skiing trip to New Hampshire, Claire developed lumbar pneumonia and died. To save Hank money, I advised him to put Claire's ashes in the same expensive urn with his first wife."

"But why . . . ?"

"There was ample room in the urn, and why not?' Did it make any sense to buy a second expensive urn?' And if he bought a cheaper one, that would've indicated to his friends that he thought less of Claire than he did of his first wife. But my practical suggestion backfired. Hank got so he was staring at the urn all the time brooding over and about the mixed ashes of these two women, and eventually he cracked up. And because it was my fault, I felt bad about it for weeks."

"That isn't a true story, is it?' Is it, James?'

"No, it isn't a true story. I made it up to please you, because, it seems, you're a little old lady who likes stories."

"No, I'm not-and I don't like stories like that!"

"I'm leading up to Debierue, and I promise you that it's much more interesting than the story of Dr. Goldhagen's two wives."

"I'm sorry I interrupted, James. May I pour you another cup of coffee?"

"Please. Let me tell you first about the Scatologieschul that was formed by Willy Buttner in Berlin, during the post-war years of German political art. The Scatologieschul probably holds the European record for short-livedness. It opened and closed in eight minutes flat. Herr Buttner and his three defiant fellow exhibitors, together with their cretin model- who denied her obvious presence in every painting-were carted off to jail. The paintings were confiscated, never to be seen by the public again. According to rumor, these ostensibly pornographic paintings wound up in General Goering's private collection. They're now believed to be in Russia, but no one really knows. I couldn't find a single eyewitness who had seen the pictures, although a lot of people knew about the exhibit. This was another frustrating experience for me in Europe.

"By the early sixties the trail was too cold for valid, documentary evidence. I was too late. The European Depression and World War Two had destroyed the evidence. I still feel that the critical neglect of these so-called minor movements may prove to be an incalculable loss to art history. Then, as now, critics only choose a very small number of painters to be the representatives of their times. And we only remember the names of those who come in first. Any sports writer can recall that Jesse Owens was the fastest runner in the 1936 Olympics, but he won't remember the names of the second and third place runners who were only split seconds behind him.

"Therefore, it's almost miraculous that Jacques Debierue was noticed at all. When you think about the peculiar mixture of hope and disillusionment of the twenties, he seems to be the most unlikely candidate of all the artists of the time to be singled out for fame. And he was studiedly indifferent to the press.

"One painter, a true archetype, can hardly be said to constitute a movement, but Debierue rose above the Parisian art world like an extended middle finger. Paris critics found it embarrassing to admit that none of them knew the exact date his one-man show opened. The known details of the discovery of Debierue, and the impact of his influence on other painters, has been examined at some length by August Hauptmann in his monograph entitled Debienue. This isn't a long book, not for the work of a German scholar, but it's a well-documented study of Debierue's original achievement.

"There isn't any mass of published work on Debierue, as there is on Pablo Picasso, but Debierue's name crops up all the time in the biographies and autobiographies of other famous modern painters-usually in strange circumstances. The frequent mention of his name isn't surprising. Before Debierue was in the art world, he was of it. Because he framed their paintings, he knew personally, and well, most of the other firsts of the war and postwar years."

"He was a picture framer?"