Life Class His rich old aunt had traced their familiy back to Cadillac And so in 1914 he felt honor-bound to volunteer at his Louisiana Parish He was severely wounded in one of the early battles And stayed on in Paris even before the armistice was signed Enrolled at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts He studied skeletons - cut up corpses - learned to draw from plaster casts He was bayou-born and bred yet he drank with lost Russian Jews The expatriates Soutine and Chagall and Moldovan He visited with Picasso and Vlaminck And traded cigars and sketches with Rouault They became his friends although he did not understand their art Especially the deliberate distortions of the human form he loved to draw First from casts - later from life It was as if time stopped for him with each new pose With each sensuous curving of flesh and sub-surface bone God's handiwork held a continuous fascination for him Even after thousands of sketches and finished studies from the nude He came to know more anatomy than some young surgeons and smiled from on high When one of them got into trouble sectioning a cadaver in the theater And had to consult a text He was a bull of a man - Short and squat His shoulders sloped with power and he limped One leg shaved down from wounds which earned both Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre Hr was cursed with Lautrec's disease The absinthe carafe always at hand A battle with himself he eventually would not survive But that was still to come For now he was a young man in the City of Light With lovely girls to draw and love and pulsing streets to roam And the conviviality of friends to fill the joyous nights His inheritance arrived with regularity each month In tiny increments at the American Express More than enough to sustain his simple needs and also share With less fortunate friends He was illusionless as to his gifts Content to caress the model's contours with just his eyes Rarely looking down or lifting his pen from the vellum Until each exquisitely-shaped form materialized Chaim Soutine was his closest friend - Undisciplined and mad A chain-smoking consumptive He was a mess and his pictures were a mess A mindless slop scumbled together in just hours Pigment slammed angrily into pigment without first drying He mixed his colors such as they were directly on the canvas Most notably murderous reds and nauseous greys Vicious pictures of bloody abbatoirs emerged Slaughtered chickens - sickly choir-boys Scarred drunks sprawled in streets teeming with scran Wild violent landscapes One day Chaim took him to Ambrose Vollard's to see crazy Vincent's pictures He recognized Chaim's tortured madness in them too But there was a difference - Unlike Chaim, Van Gogh could draw He brought thirteen of his sketches from the gallery folio And a small sunny Provence landscape that reminded him of the fields Of his childhood home in Jeanerette Chaim told him Vollard had been buying Vincent for some years On Modigliani's advice Leo Zborowski and Paul Rosenberg Were also buying Chaim - mostly with absinthe And hiding his pictures in a warehouse Then in the summer of '41 when jackboots and tanks Thundered down the Elysee and marched into his beloved Monmarte He left Paris on the last free train for Lisbon and Pan-Am's transantlantic clipper He carried only a small valise of personals and his precious Vincents The twelve ugly Soutines purchased from Chaim over the years Had been rolled into sealed metal tubes And shipped to his friend Yasuo in New York He was almost fifty now and like Chaim his absinthism had debilitated him That damned accursed worm-wood juice had slowly poisoned his insides And he'd having blackouts for some months He also had to mortgage his inheritance to get him to Manhattan Kuniyoshi put him up in a corner of his loft A five-story walkup - with Marcel Duchamps He of armory fame - descending nudes - and fifty chessboards on the floor below He started teaching life classes at Cooper Union and the League After a few weeks he also found himself a loft and that winter He finished the last of the absinthe he'd shipped the year before Together with those sickening Soutines I first met him after the war in '49 In the back room of McSorley's down the street from the Union He was sitting with Kuni listening to Dylan Thomas recite For yet another complimentary glass of ale I watched his eyes mist as the poet's melliloquent voice Flowed out his immortal verses I was enrolled in Kuni's painting class at the League on the GI bill And when Yasuo saw me he invited me to sit with them (It was strange to sit opposite a man whose progenitors I was taught to hate a few short years before) Yasuo introduced me and I told him I was thinking of taking his life class in the fall He said he was looking for someone to monitor his evening classes on the nights he wasn't there And if I was interested I could start tomorrow (So this is how I got to know him and know his story) That night we all went back to Kuni's for saki With Dylan staggering in the lead Because he wanted to see those wild re-stretched Soutines again They were still stored in a corner of Yasuo's loft And screamed at us when we uncovered them As the months slipped past he slipped fast too The absinthe had been replaced by bourbon The pain in his shattered leg became unbearable He started missing classes and I had to lie to the director That he was home sick or that his creole aunt was dying And he had gone to visit her in Jeanerette It was my job to schedule the models and run the clock to time the changes (Some weeks a luscious Kim Hunter or Maureen Stapleton Or a young Charleton Heston or Marlon Brando posed) I also helped beginners master his exceptional course of rapid gestures Interspersed with laborious contour images and final studies And I critiqued the novices at sessions' end No one complained he wasn't there because no one really cared That summer I went up to Maine for a couple of months When I got back I stopped by his place and he was gone He had been living with one of the models A pretty light-skinned black young enough to be his daughter She told me she found him dead one stifling evening in July He had been drinking and fallen and broken his head I looked for the Vincents but they had disappeared She said she didn't know anything about them but I did not believe her I went to Yasuo's to find out what they did with him Kuni said a lawyer had the body shipped to his wealthy aunt in Jeanerette The lawyer asked to see me when I got back from Maine He told me what little money was left went to the girl He presented me with a detailed summary of all costs And that the aunt had paid the remaining balances and his expenses And that was almost that except... EXCEPT... he had also willed me the Soutines! My God!... Those twelve fabulous magnificent incredible Soutines! Some years went by and then one quiet August afternoon A man representing Paul Rosenberg New York Incorporated Acting for a Dr Alfred Barnes of Philadelphia said to be a noted collector Came to inquire about my inheritance Did I still have the pictures? - Would I consider selling them? Was there a proper provenance for each? Fortunately my benefactor had seen to it that Wildenstein in Paris And later in New York authenticated them as works of crazy Chaim I wondered about the sudden interest in that maniac's work The art critic of the New York Times came through for me It seems Paul Rosenberg Paris Inc had recently discovered A fantastic cache of Chaims in an obscure corner of their vaults And had cleaned, repaired and revarnished all ninety-four of them Also according to the Times After the appropriate hoopla and interviews with major critics and experts A restrospective of Chaim's works was to be mounted At New York's Museum of Modern Art affectionally known as Moma To honor this long-overlooked Master of the French Expressionist School and anoint him With the belated posthumous recognition he so richly and emphatically deserved Moma-Rosenberg-Barnes lawyers told me they were willing to negotiate Enormous sums for me and also declare my Soutines to be on permanent loan To Moma Incorporated for tax purposes I was told this would inflate my net worth to the sky Without the corresponding fiscal penalties Soon representatives from other Famous Museums of Contemporary Art arrived Asking to see my pictures and when I showed them only slides They were disappointed but declared if my Chaims were truly genuine They would outbid Moma Incorporated to enhance their own collections I kept stalling and as the opening of the retrospective drew near Their bids soared into the stratosphere My benefactor's loft was broken into several times As I had picked up the lease after his death and was now living there myself My Soutines though had been carefully crated and sealed When the furor first arose and now resided in safety In a fireproof and bonded warehouse way up north in Portland Maine One day while all this was going on A friend asked me to accompany her to a much-ballyhooed auction Of Artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist School of France at the Pace We sat quietly in the back listening to the spectacular price pyrotechnics When suddenly my benefactor's small exquisite Vincent Framed elaborately in carved and gilded wood Appeared on the auctioneer's easel A noticeable stir arose from the hard-eyed speculators and assembled dilettante When the haughty pro on the stage asked the "Ladies and Gentlemen" To kindly begin the bidding at three-hundred thousand (Very low for a Vincent I agree but remember this was still the 1950's) After a delay as some technical problems with phone bids were resolved It was purchased for five-hundred thousand by a well-manicured gentleman Whose company manufactured wind-up toys for early discounters Assembled by dexterous children in the partitioned and democratically preserved Lower half of the Korean Peninsula I whispered to my companion Of the irony of Vincent's one and only sale to artist Anna Brock For it was shortly before his death in 1889 that she purchased his "Red Vines" For about four-hundred francs What was the exchange rate at the time my pretty friend asked? Approximately ten to one or about forty dollars I replied But I digress - Let's get back to my Soutines In the winter of 1913 - two of Chaim's pictures along with the works Of the deviants Braque and Brancusi and Duchamp and Picasso and Cezanne Along with many other Impressionist and Expressionist and Cubist and Fauvist and Dadaist And God only knows what other French innovation Showed up on a Manhattan dock These weird works were solicited by the Ash-Canners and other American artists To be exhibited jointly with their own They were immediately condemned by knowledgeable customs officers Who declared emphatically this stuff was shit not art Thus subject to various import duties and assorted tariffs Fortunately the Constitution did not agree and it was all allowed to be exhibited Along with stacked rifles and mortar tubes and primitive tanks and trucks Within the sandstone walls of the huge armory at 26th and Park Where everything was promptly vilified and spat upon By critics and public alike And so to make a long sad story short After a frenetic schizophrenic aberrant and very lonely existence Creating his sick images in relative obscurity Some twelve years after his suicide in 1943 And many long and bitter years after his armory humiliation Chaim exploded like a comet all over Moma's hallowed walls That's right by God!... After all those impoverished disillusioned self-destructive years Chaim had finally arrived - Gone "public" so to speak He was now a valuable "commodity!" He was money in the bank for all the hustlers and promoters and the tax cheats Chaim's retrospective was an incredible success! Prices for his pictures soared as reams of florid and exuberantly critical prose Flowed from the pens of the cognescenti It was as if his madness had infected one and all Punched them in the gut with his brilliant observations of the human scene Staggered them with his masterful execution and technique Students of Art gazed passionately at his extraordinary imagery and dreamed Fashionably-dressed women and impressionable girls Wept openly in Moma's galleries Impeccably-tailored businessmen and Wall Street bankers were moved By the compassionate representations on its walls Directors of museums and proprietors of upscale galleries uptown Hounded me at all hours with lucrative offers for my treasures (The Times reported one of Chaim's lesser works had recently been purchased For five figures by the Shah of Iran!) All that summer I could not work - I could not sleep I started drinking bourbon I was rich - Incredibly rich and it was driving me crazy I could not stand it anymore! So on a crisp evening in early autumn I got into my '51 Packard And drove all night up to Portland to the fireproof and bonded warehouse On Commercial Street down by the docks I had them load my three cases of Soutines into the big car and borrowed a wrecking bar I drove up the coast to the State Park at the mouth of the great Kennebec Where once - one hundred and twenty four unfortunate souls Commanded by an elderly and frail George Popham Were dumped four hundred years before It had turned cold and gray and there was no one but their ghosts To witness my pitiful act of defiance I lugged the crates down to the beach and pried them open I propped each picture against the rocks And there was crazy Chaim Displayed for me for the last time in all his frightening glory I wiped away the tears and stacked the pictures And the remains of broken crates into a tall pyre I siphoned some gas out of the Packard and soaked everything through And lit a cigarette and smoked it down And flicked the butt Later the wind came up The sea flowed angrily over the sooted rocks and washed them clean Chaim's ashes floated off with the receding tide and Dissolved Disappeared Vanished into the vastness of the dispassionate sea Wild and crazy Chaim would have loved it! I'm sure he really would have loved it! | 
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