DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 4)

He walked me to a wall and, with a flourish of his hand, presented a painting of ancient Greece. Great. Aristotle thought some people were born to be slaves.

“This is A Reading from Homer,” he said, “by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Romanticism from 1885. Look at it.”

I did. For quite a while. The key to entering one of Uncle Mason’s prints was to relax your brain and not think about what you were seeing, to just let it wash over you, but that was an impossibility right then. I was too angry and was swimming against the current. I saw the painting and wanted to scream at every gray vein in the marble. I wanted to grab the woman in repose, slap her hand away from her man’s, and shake her. I wanted to shake her and disrupt the whole languid scene, stir the placid blue of the Aegean in the background into tumultuous stormbidden sackcloth.

But I kept watching the still-life play before my eyes. I couldn’t deny there was something welcoming and comfortable about the vision. My shirt and shorts felt clingy, like they were tugging at my skin. The fur-tunicked man on the ground was lying prone, a faun having settled into a field for a nap. The stone of the agora looked more relaxing, more agreeable than a plush sofa. I started to hear the voice of the poet, the lines of ancient Greek dactylic hexameter pinging off the strings of the cithara across the frame. The scent of the sea filled my nose. I gave myself over, and I was inside.

“How do you feel?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“Calm. Relaxed.”

“Good. Now tell me what’s happening here.”

“A poet’s reading Homer,” I said.

“For what purpose?”

I looked around the agora, hoping to find the answer etched in marble.

“Have you ever read Homer?” Uncle Mason asked.

“In school, yeah.”

He indicated the scene before me with an upturned hand.

“This is a class?” I asked.

“Absolutely. Homer was the bedrock of Greek and Roman education practically from the moment he started writing.”

I stared into the faces of the four students. They were transfixed by the poet, by the words from the scroll. I could read the flaring lights in their eyes, having spent most of my life seeing rows of faces struggling to stay awake at their desks.

“What’s with them?” I asked.

“The students?”

“Yeah. He’s laying on the floor, she’s reclining, those two are leaning against the wall. What kind of classroom is this?”

“That’s the question,” Uncle Mason said. “When did I say this was painted?”

“1885.”

“When you hear that year, what do you think of?”

“Not this.”

“Right. So, what do you think of?”

“Men with pocket watches and pince-nez. Women in ostentatious hats and huge skirts.”

“What else? What big things were happening at that time?”

“I don’t know. Queen Victoria. The Industrial Revolution.”

“Exactly. The Victorian Era, the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque. This was painted at a time when rapid industrialization was ushering in seismic changes in the way all of civilization functioned. It was changing so drastically, so rapidly, that a lot of people found the whole thing confusing and frightening. A lot of them weren’t sure how to adjust, just as we’re now living through a radical change in societal expectations due to the digital revolution. Don’t be surprised if in your lifetime the term ‘digital revolution’ ends up being capitalized. Now, based on what I’ve just told you and what this scene depicts, can you make an educated guess what one of those big changes of the Victorian Era brought?”

“Education?”

“Standardized education for all. It’s because of the Victorian Era that you guys sit at desks arranged in ranks and files. Formalism in all things was one of the key virtues of the day.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get what this painting has to do with that?”

“Before we came in here, I told you the title, who painted it, when it was painted, and what else?”

“Romanticism.”

“Right. Now I’m going to clue you in on something most people should know but have forgotten. The word ‘romantic’ has nothing to do with being in love.”

I looked at Uncle Mason like he was speaking in tongues.

“It’s true. Look at this painting. What does this image have to do with love? Nothing, but we associate the word with it because of love stories. Quick—name a love story.”

“Romeo & Juliet.”

“Good. How does it end?”

“They both die.”

“Good. Name another.”

“Uh, Before Sunrise.”

“How’s it end?”

“They go their separate ways, and we don’t know if they meet again until the sequel.”

“Name another.”

“Um… that, what’s that German book about the guy who kills himself for a girl?”

“Sorrows of Young Werther. You’re starting to see my point?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The word ‘romance’ comes from Anglo-Saxon and Old French words that meant ‘Roman.’ The word ‘roman’ is right there in ‘romance.’ And you’ve already taken enough world history to know how much European history is predicated on one kingdom or another using the legacy of the Roman Empire to give itself legitimacy. Romance is about loss and trying to reclaim what’s been lost.” He turned me to face the agora. “That’s what Alma-Tadema is trying to do. He wants the staid, formalistic existence-by-rote of his time to learn from the vibrancy of what has come before but no longer exists.”

I thought of all the times a teacher had delayed the start of class, trying to wrangle two kids back into their assigned seats. I remembered the occasional lively discussion in a room between the teacher and the students, instigated by an idea or morsel of knowledge expelled from one of the kids, how adroitly the teacher would talk around the subject without admitting that all they knew about it had come from the curriculum-approved study guide. It had always made me feel like the police outside our home had stepped aside and allowed the intruders entry. With a few words, Uncle Mason had made the assortment of gold stars and stickers that had adorned my elementary school quizzes stink of industrial runoff, and I saw them spilling into the rivers and oceans. All those uplifting pieces of signage that had graced the walls began to emit the pro forma honk of the teacher from Peanuts. Every shred of positive reinforcement I’d ever received, from teachers or coaches or my parents, took on the bark of a pedagogical sadist warning me to eat my meat if I wanted my pudding. I felt confused, twisted, a snake oblivious to the fact that the tail it was devouring was its own.

It was only after we’d exited A Reading from Homer that Uncle Mason told me about the man who’d commissioned it: Henry Gurdon Marquand. Gilded Age industrialist and banker. “The irony,” Uncle Mason explained, “was that he was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of the Old Masters of the era. He was considered a trendsetter in the art world, and it was the formalism and technical precision of the Old Masters that determined how he valued them.”

I turned back to A Reading, appraised it again, then turned back to my uncle and asked with some volume, “What the fuck?”

He looked at me like he was about to pick me off at first.

“How am I supposed to take that seriously?” pointing to the painting. “The whole thing is hypocrisy.”

“Well,” Uncle Mason said, “you have to bear in mind that, like Carnegie and a lot of other industrialists of his day, Marquand thought it was his duty to bring culture to the people. He could afford to collect the finest works of art and create a metropolitan museum for them to be housed in and exhibited for the benefit of people who couldn’t.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t he also an archangel of avarice like Carnegie and Rockefeller and all them?”

“Was he?” he asked. “You’ve heard stories of what Carnegie and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Morgan did to their employees and competitors and their customers, and you can walk into any bookstore and find volumes on any of those guys that will tell you even more horror stories.” Uncle Mason held up his pointer finger and said, “But what do you know Henry Marquand did?”

After a brief but irritating eon I said, “Okay. So, what did he do?”

“I don’t know either. I’ve never found anything on him online beyond his artistic legacy. He probably did have business practices we would call predatory. Why wouldn’t he? And I’m sure if we took a deep dive into the Library of Congress or something, we’d find them. But this is all beside the point. You know why all those guys thought it was their duty to bring culture to the plebs?” He took a dramatic pause, then answered, “God.”

“What?”

“They genuinely believed that, as good Christian men, it was their responsibility to help elevate society.”

I screamed, “How about paying their employees a fair wage? Letting them unionize without calling strikebreakers in? Health care?”

Uncle Mason had a finger in each ear. “Anna, honey, it’s so reverberant in here. Please.”

“Omigod!” I kept throwing my hands up, shrugging as if I was trying to buck my head off my shoulders. “Uncle Mason, what is the point of this? What are you trying to teach me?”

“The point is to get you to look at history through the eyes of the people that lived through it. I want you to look at them as people just like you and me.” Uncle Mason stepped toward me and stood inches from my face, looming over me like Christ on the cross above the altar. “We know more now about the natural world and how it works than ever before. We have millennia of recorded history from all over the globe and a multitude of perspectives on all of it to learn from. Innovation and advancement is occurring more quickly than it ever has. We right now are the most intelligent population that has ever inhabited this planet. And we still know nothing! We’re all flailing about, scared out of our wits, trying to put all this together into something that resembles a kind of order.” Uncle Mason marched over to A Reading from Homer. “The greedy cutthroat who commissioned this was as clueless as you and I are. He was trying to make sense of a universe that feels chaotic and arbitrary. Anna, no one is absolutely virtuous or absolutely sinful.”

“Hitler,” I said.

“Loved animals,” he countered.

My lower lip drooped, hairline fractures spider-webbing my heart. “Apologists always trot that bit out.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t take a step in my direction. But for the first time ever he frightened me. “Anna,” he said, “I introduced you to my gallery and agreed to teach you about history because you’ve always struck me as having good critical thinking skills. But I’m going to have to re-evaluate that if you’re just going to stand there and parrot self-serving rhetoric you got off Twitter.”

It was cold, almost robotic. For a moment he sounded like a man who knew how to get away with murder.

I was too frightened to pass judgment, to even form an opinion. I had to look away. As I turned, I caught in the background the gentle flag of the long black curtain over Guernica.

Uncle Mason put his hands behind his back. He rocked on his feet as he said, “Can we continue our lesson?”

I nodded, my head still pointed elsewhere.

He took me across the gallery, to a large load-baring pillar in the middle of the floor, patchworked with a number of smaller paintings, nothing like the enormous vistas we’d entered previously. We stood before one that was maybe a foot and a half by two and a half feet.

“This is Indians Spear Fishing by Albert Bierstadt,” Uncle Mason told me, then crossed his arms.

The last thing I wanted at that moment was to give my uncle what he wanted, but his arctic tone was still whipping around, and I heard the elegiac whistle of a heartless wind. I wanted to wrap myself in blankets and sit in front of a fire.

The painting was already in front of me. I lifted my head and focused my eyes. To my surprise I found the crippling chill receding, the ghostly wind dying in the light of a sun beginning to escape the horizon. I couldn’t deny the painting its grandeur, its elegance, its full-throated choir’s song for the natural world. The pink and yellow of the sun spilled over and into the background. I could feel the cool blue cotton candy wisps of the low hanging clouds brush past my fingertips. Every shade of the woods’ stippled green, from shadow-cloaked near-black to sun-baked almost-yellow, popped off the canvas with the warm alarum of rustling leaves and the call of birds in the thicket. The waterfall cascaded with a roar that lulled and crashed into the rocks like a leaf settling onto a gentle river. And the river was a spotless mirror held up to the heavens, reflecting infinity upon itself. And in the middle of it all were the Indigenous People in a canoe, a tiny hillock of furs among them, fishing with spears. Afloat beneath the rocky monolith of nature’s wondrous power, they simply existed, unaffected by the vampirism of modernity, desiring nothing but to live in the flow of the world as it was.

Bierstadt’s work simply opened its arms and allowed me to drift into its virgin wilderness. I hadn’t even noticed I’d entered the painting, and now that I was there, I found myself in a thrall that made my heart trill. I could feel the blood coursing through my body at a gallop backed by the steady race of drums. The idyll was a rollercoaster at a Kiss concert. Goosebumps rose on my arms. I was trembling, a six-year old entering the world’s most famous theme park for the first time, eyes as big as the moon, tears threatening.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“It’s…” I couldn’t finish a sentence. The audacity of adrenaline was overwhelming me and stealing the words from my mouth. “It’s spectacular,” I finally got out.

Uncle Mason nodded. “That’s a fitting description. When Bierstadt painted this in 1862, landscapes were largely about spectacle, especially when they were of the American West.”

“This is… this is what they mean when they say God’s Country.”

“Yes, it is.”

As a child does when she can accept that the source of her excitement is real and tangible, my breath started to calm. “It really is glorious,” I said.

Uncle Mason said, “That was the point, to make God’s glory palpable.”

I turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“1862,” he said. “Transcendentalism was happening. The Civil War was happening. So was westward expansion, and the government promoted the hell out of it.

“The first time Albert Bierstadt ever went west of the Mississippi River, he was part of a government commission. The U.S. had all these tracts of land that went further than you could see in every direction.” Uncle Mason pointed to the mountainous wall swallowing the right of the frame. “All those deposits of stone and minerals.” He pointed to the river. “All those natural highways and the fish to pluck out of them.” He pointed to the woods on the left. “All that timber and the land beneath it to cultivate.” He pointed to the Indigenous fishermen. “And not that much standing in the way of it all. All that land at the disposal of the United States, placed at its feet by the grace of God, and remember that God gazed down on America and chose it to be his instrument.”

Uncle Mason’s arm swept across the unsullied splendor before me. “See how exciting Manifest Destiny is?”