Affairs of Art Read Online Free PDF Page B

paper — you always laughed at its gilt frame — I bought on the ninth floor at Eaton’s, in the gallery-corridor where works by modern painters were sometimes slipped in, disguised as friends of the old ones. There, at least, the prices were displayed. The yellow seething resembled an abstraction, but it could also be a twenty-dollar haystack. It’s all in my eye, I thought, before I’d discovered the rules of art.
    I hung it, alone and arrogant, on the wall of the double living room that was my first apartment, a mezzanine on Querbes Avenue, around the corner from the house Marianne had just moved to with her lawyer and his cancer. At my place the days were as dark as the nights, cockroaches haunted the two closets, but my life was more luminous than a Greek sky, or what I imagined a Greek sky to be, judging from the janitor’s accent. There was Solange and wine at two dollars a bottle — Spanish Iago that set us apart from the beer-drinkers — candles, pates, and the positions of love, all preparations for the enormous pain promised by all of Greco’s songs. There was my change of direction, the decision to enroll in art history at the university rather than education, I had to do battle with some sec­retaries, voices were raised, and I realized I could do it even though I’d been born on Mentana Street.
    Don’t believe those who tell stories about the sixties, Vitalie, who didn’t live through them here. The city was in a ferment only in two seedy cafés where three poets rambled and raved. I ignored them. One could drink Iago and learn ten ways to cook pasta without taking the route of being and nothingness. One could rebel at being greeted in English at the Stable Gallery which for us, of course, was the Galerie de l’Étable, without longing for Quebec’s independence. Demolition crews levelled the most classic Sherbrooke Street mansions and the future art historian didn’t see a thing: the world began with Borduas.
    I was studious. I ate crêpes bretonnes across from the Bibliothèque Nationale where I dragged Solange at the end of the afternoon, it was probably there that the first thread snapped. She sometimes found very little to read, whereas I was initiating myself, I had to, into the art of centuries past. She would sigh as if she were in church, oppressed by the oak and the stained glass, or by the whispers meticulously dispensed by pale clerks with weary tread. She was bored, while I was discovering a fleeting glimmer scarcely grasped — the vein to be mined, the fault, as the prospectors say up where you come from.
    About the art being created here, there was nothing one could learn in a library. Even the extravagant praise for our sculptors who copied the Europeans had to be extirpated from a literature that was first of all religious. There weren’t ten books on secular art, a smattering, I did not yet know how to search the newspapers. No, I didn’t resolve then and there to become the great interpreter of contemporary art, there was nothing of the conqueror about me. I made my guesses at random, moving from question to question. While Solange sighed. I remember her long straight hair, the bangs that gave her a sombre look, in the fall she was going to teach in a high school for girls on the Plateau Mont-Royal, she had bought a sundress and thrown out all her notes, she read novels now. Came September and henceforth we would meet at six p.m., a teacher of English as a second language and a university student, our notebooks separated, but the Iago still helped me to forget.
    At the time, I found genius in Picasso. It was at the museum, before the recently acquired Blind Minotaur, that Solange announced the purchase of a red car, a huge used Plymouth. We could explore the Laurentians on weekends. I was getting ready to explain to her the part man, part horse standing against the shadow of the night and the darkness of his life.