What I Loved Read Online Free PDF

covered with a fine hair. Bill called it "lanugo" and said that the starving body often grows hair for protection. He said that he had spent hours studying medical and documentary photographs to get it right. Her skeletal body was painful to look at, and her huge eyes gleamed as if she had a fever. Bill had painted her emaciated body in color, first rendering her with painstaking realism and then going over her body with bold, expressionistic strokes, using blue and green and dabs of red on her thighs and neck. The black-and- white background resembled an aging photograph, like the ones I keep in my drawer. On the floor behind Violet were several pairs of shoes — men's, women's, and children's, painted in gray tones. When I asked Bill if this portrait referred to the death camps, he said yes, and we talked about Adorno for over an hour. The philosopher had said there could be no art after the camps.
    I knew Bernie Weeks through a colleague at Columbia, Jack Newman. The Weeks Gallery on West Broadway had done well, because Bernie had a talent for sniffing out new artists, and he had connections. He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody." "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful. When I introduced Bernie to Bill, Bernie was probably about forty-five, but his age was subsumed by his youthful presence. He wore immaculate, up-to-the-minute suits with brightly colored sneakers. The casual shoes gave him a faint air of eccentricity always welcome in the art world, but they also added to what I thought of as Bernie's bounce. He never stopped moving. He ran up stairs, hopped into elevators, rocked back and forth on his heels when he examined a piece of art, and jiggled his knees through most conversations. By drawing attention to his feet, he alerted the world to his indefatigable go-getting and nonstop pursuit of newness. He had a breathless patter to go with the bounce, and his speech, although sometimes fractured, was never stupid. I pushed Bernie to look at Bill's work and had Jack call Bernie as well. Jack had already been to Bill's studio and had become a convert to what he called "the growing and shrinking Violets."
    I wasn't on the Bowery when Bernie came to look at the work, but it ended as I had hoped. The paintings were shown the following fall. "They're weird," Bernie said to me. "Good weird. I think the fat/thin angle is going to fly. Everybody's on a diet, for Christ's sake, and the self-portrait bit. It's good. It's a little risky to show new figurative work right now, but he's got something. And, I like the quotations. Vermeer, de Kooning, and Guston after his revolution."
    By the time the show opened, Violet Blom had flown off to Paris. I met her just once before she left — on the stairway in 89 Bowery. I was coming. She was going. I recognized her, introduced myself, and she paused on the steps. Violet was more beautiful than Bill's paintings of her. She had large green eyes with dark lashes that dominated her round face. Curling brown hair fell over her shoulders, and although her body was hidden under a long coat, I came to the conclusion that she was not thin but didn't qualify as chubby either. She shook my hand warmly, said she had heard all about me, and added, "I love the fat one with the taxi." She then said she was sorry she had to run and raced down the stairs. As I continued my climb, I heard her call my name. When I turned around, I saw that she was already standing in front of the door to the street. "You don't mind if I call you Leo, do you?" I shook my head.
    She ran back up the stairs, stopped a couple of steps below me, and said, "Bill really likes you." She hesitated. "I'm going away, you see. I'd like to be able to think that you're there for him."
    I nodded. She took a couple more steps, reached up for my shoulder, and squeezed it