The Burnt Orange Heresy

The only barrier to the studio was the hasp and the heavy Yale lock on the door. Once broken there would be no way to prevent Debierue from guessing that I had returned. But if the artist had been afraid he might lose his house key, it also seemed unlikely that he would take the studio padlock key to the theater.

Switching on the lights as I searched, I made a hasty, fruitless examination of the kitchen before moving on to the bedroom. Two keys together on a short twist of copper wire, both of them identical, were in plain view on top of the highboy dresser. I unlocked the padlock, opened the studio door, and flipped the row of toggles on the wall. The boxlike windowless room, after hesitant blue white flickers, brightened into an icy, intense brilliance. There were a dozen overhead fluorescent tubes in parallel sets of three (two blue white to one yellow) flush with the ceiling. Under this cold light I noticed first the patching of new brickwork that filled the spaces where two windows had been before, despite the new coat of white enamel that covered the walls.

Blinking my eyes to accustom them to the intense overhead light, I closed the door behind me. My thumping heart was prepared for the impact of the unusual, the unique, for the miraculous in visual art, but instead of wine and fish I didn't find even bread and water.

There were canvases, at least two dozen of them, and all of these pristine canvases were the same size, 24" x 30". They were stacked in white plastic racks against the western wall. The racks were the commercial kind one often finds in art supply stores. I checked every one of these glittering white canvases. None of them had been touched by paint or charcoal.

There was a new, gunmetal desk in the southwest corner of the studio, with a matching chair cushioned in light gray Naugahyde. On the desk there was a fruit jar filled with sharpened pencils and ballpoint pens, a square glass paperweight (slightly magnified) holding down some correspondence, and a beautiful desk calendar (an Almanacco Artistica Italiano product in brilliant colors, made by Alfieri & Lacroix, Milano). Without shame, I read the two letters that had been held down by the paperweight. One was a letter from a Parisian clipping service, stating that Debierue's name had been mentioned twice in the foreword to a new art history pictorial collection, but inasmuch as the illustrated volume was quite expensive, the manager had written to the publisher and requested a courtesy copy for Debierue. He would send it along as soon as-or if-he received it. There was a news clipping from Paris Soir, an unsigned review of a Man Ray retrospective exhibit in Paris, and Debierue's name was mentioned, together with the names of a dozen other artists, in a listing of Dadaists who had known Man Ray during the 1920s.

Debierue had answered the manager of the clipping service in a crabbed, backhanded script with cursive letters so microscopic he must have written the letter with the aid of the magnified paperweight. He merely told the manager not to send the book if he got a free copy, and not to buy it if he did not. Except for Debierue's surname (the tiny lowercase letters "e" through "e" were all contained within a large capital "D") there was no complimentary closing. Debierue had a unique signature. I folded the letter and put it into the breast pocket of my jumpsuit.

As I looked through the unlocked drawers of the desk, I found nothing else to hold my interest, except for a scrapbook of clippings. The scrapbook, 10" x 12k, bound in gray cardboard covers, was less than half filled, and from the first clipping to the last one pasted in, covered an eighteenmonth period. Most of the earlier clippings were reports of the fire that had burned down his villa, similar accounts from many different newspapers. The more recent clippings were shorter-like the mention of his name in the Man Ray art review. The items in the other drawers were what one expects to find. Stationery and supplies, stamps, glue, correspondence in manila folders-unusual perhaps because of the meticulous neatness one doesn't associate with desk drawers.