The Burnt Orange Heresy

"'That,' Debierue replied, 'isn't my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.' With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.

"Perhaps it was the naivete of his reply that agitated an immediate concern among the painters he had known and befriended. At any rate, an organization named Les Amis de Debierue was formed hastily, within the month following his departure from the city. It's never disbanded."

"There was an organization like that formed for T. S. Eliot, but it disbanded. The purpose was to get Mr. Eliot out of his job at the bank."

"I know. But Eliot took another job in publishing. Debierue, so far as we know, never made another picture frame, except for his own work. Les Amis held its first fundraising banquet in Paris, and through this continuing activity enough money was collected to give the artist a small annual subsidy. Other donations are still solicited from art lovers annually. I've been giving Les Amis de Debierue at least five bucks a year since I left graduate school.

"During World War Two, the Germans let Debierue alone. Thanks to two critical articles that had linked his name with Nietzsche, he wasn't considered as a 'degenerate' French artist. And apparently they didn't discover any of his current work to examine for 'flaws.'

"When the Riviera was liberated, it was immediately transformed into an R and R area for U.S. troops, and he was soon visited by art students, now in uniform, who'd read about him in college. They mentioned him in their letters home, and it didn't take long for American art groups to begin a fresh flow of clothing, food, art supplies, and money to his Riviera outpost.

"Debierue had survived two world wars, and a dozen ideological battles.

"The first three reviews of Debierue's Riviera works, with a nod to symbolisme, are self-explanatory. 'Fantasy,' 'Oblique, and 'Rain' are the names given to his first three 'periods'-as assigned by the first three critics who were allowed to examine his paintings. The fourth period, 'Chironesque,' is so hermetic it requires some amplification."

Berenice nodded in assent.

"A paucity of scholastic effort was put into the examination of these four important essays. Little has been published, either in book or monograph form as in-depth studies of each period-the way Picasso's Rose and Blue periods have been covered. This is understandable, because the public never saw any of these pictures.

"The established critic prefers to examine the original work, or at least colored slides of that work, before he reaches his own conclusions. To refute or to agree with the critic who's seen the work puts a man on shaky ground. Each new article, as it appeared, however, received considerable attention. But writers were chary of making any expanded judgments based upon the descriptions alone."

"Yes, I can understand that."

"This general tendency didn't hold true for Louis Galt's essay, 'Debierue: The Chironesque Period, which appeared in the Summer, 1958, The Nonobjectivist. It was reprinted in more than a dozen languages and art journals.

"Galt, you see, was known as an avowed purist in his approach to nonobjective art, and that's why he published his article in The Nonobjectivist when he could've had it published by Art News for ten times as much money. Galt had once gone so far as to call Mondrian a 'traitor' in print when the Dutchman gave up his black-and-white palette to experiment with color in his linear paintings. I didn't agree with him there, but he made some telling points. But with so many able critics available, all of them anxious to see Debierue's post-World War Two work, it was considered a damned shame that he'd chosen a purist who would only look at the new work from a prejudiced viewpoint.

"The appellation 'Chironesque' was considered as a derogatory 'literary' term. It was deeply resented by Susan Sontag, who said so in The Partisan Review. The Galt essay wasn't, in all fairness, disrespectful, but Gait stated bluntly that Debierue had retrogressed. He claimed that 'bicephalous centaurlike creatures' were clearly visible in the dozen paintings Debierue had shown him. And this forced Gait to conclude that the 'master' was now a 'teacher,' and that didacticism had no place in contemporary art. The 'purist' view, of course."

"Of course." Berenice nodded.

"At any rate-and here he was reaching for it-because Chiron the centaur was the mythical teacher of Hercules, and other Greek heroes, Gait christened the period 'Chironesque: This was a cunning allusion to the classicism Galt detested, elements Galt would've considered regressive in any modern painter.

"Debierue, of course, said nothing."

Berenice nodded and closed her eyes.