The Painted Kiss (18 page)

“Do you want me to come?”

“If you want to,” he said. “I have to get up early.”

We slept on the floor of the greenhouse, entwined innocently, like retrievers worn out from a day of hunting. It was only as I was drifting to sleep that I realized that I hadn’t said “I love you” out loud.

In the morning an errant ray of sun pierced a cloud and woke me up. Next to me, Gustav made a sound like a zipper closing. I put my share of the blanket over him and sneaked back to my room.

Everyone else was still asleep, apparently. I slid under my down comforter, to make my bed look as if it had been slept in and to warm my stiff joints. Though the bed was soft and I was tired from a night of fitful rolling on the hard greenhouse floor, I couldn’t quiet my mind enough to drift off.

I remembered the time in the café, when I was a little girl still and he rubbed my face with a handkerchief dipped in ice water. The water stung my chapped cheeks and made them even redder, and he said something about them, how they wouldn’t be out of place in a Watteau. I asked what a Watteau was and he paid the bill and took me straight to the museum, where they had a Watteau, the doll-like figures of a girl and boy having a picnic. I didn’t like them, insipidly drawn and precious, and said so. Gustav agreed but then pointed out to me the delicate, almost invisible brushstrokes and the infinitesimal variations of color in patches I thought were just pink or just blue. I could learn more from the things I didn’t like than from the things I did, he said. He wanted to know what I thought of others, of Brueghel and Bosch and a strange man who painted portraits of the seasons shaped out of vegetables. He laughed delightedly at some of the things I said and argued with me about others, but always took what I said seriously. I had an interesting mind, he said. But now I was no longer a little girl.

In the fall, Gustav moved his studio to Hietzing. He and Franz Matsch had been sharing a studio but little else for several years. The partnership was now dissolved, though they still shared in the work for University Hall.

The studio was just beyond the southern wall of Schönbrunn Palace. It was a short walk past the stonemason’s workshop from the train station to the studio. The houses in the neighborhood, Gustav’s included, were painted a cheerful, dairy yellow, like the inside of a buttercream chocolate, which contrasted attractively with their red tile roofs and black or dark green shutters. Gustav’s bungalow was just off the main street and hidden behind a stone wall and a deep copse of lindens and alders and pear trees. A wrought iron gate opened onto a brick path that led to the house. Behind the house an overgrown garden of impatiens and ivy was usually inhabited by several cats, which hunted birds and sunned themselves on the wall and the paths. Beyond the garden, alfalfa fields of artificial-looking luxuriance stretched for acres. The front door of the studio opened onto the room where Gustav slept when he stayed at the studio. A long narrow hallway led past the tiny kitchen to the large room with windows that opened onto the back garden.

This is where Gustav was working when the controversy over his painting of Philosophy, one of the University Hall paintings, broke.
Philosophy
was, if anything, more disturbing than
Medicine
. Near the center an amorphous face emerged from the ether: was it God? Wisdom? To the side a column of naked, sinewy figures embraced and clutched their heads in despair or agony. And below them, nearly cut off at the bottom of the canvas, a clear-eyed, sinister woman stared directly at the viewer. Who was she? What did she represent?

The university professors were horrified. There was a meeting. Eighty-seven of them had signed a petition demanding that
Philosophy
not be hung in the Great Hall. They considered it an affront to reason and learning. The papers all carried accounts of the scandal, with various interpretations depending on their political slant. All of the critics weighed in, some very cruelly.

He was disheveled and angry when I arrived at the studio.

“I knew this would happen,” he said. “The academics. They think art is like science, or should be. They want a nice equation,
x
plus
y
equals
z
. But it’s impossible. And even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be art.”

“I know,” I said. The only thing to do in these situations was to listen sympathetically until the rant had run its course. Then, when you had reached the end of that, insulting the critics usually worked.

“Jodl called my paintings ugly. Ugly! Can you believe that? Of all the things you could call them, I never thought anyone would call them ugly.”

“I’ve never seen anything so lovely,” I said. “Disturbing and frightening and terrifying, but lovely.”

“Well, you’re supposed to be disturbed and terrified. Anyone who isn’t is in denial of what life is.”

“I know,” I said.

“Kraus said my paintings showed that I was ignorant of philosophy and that stupid people shouldn’t be allowed access to brushes and paint.”

“You know that’s not true,” I said. “Even stupid people should be allowed access to brushes and paint.”

Gustav smiled, but only briefly. “Of course you know you’re not stupid,” I said. “Kraus just said that because he has a talent for sticking the knife in just the right spot.”

“He’s brilliant, though,” said Gustav.

“Not when it comes to art,” I said.

“Then after Jodl finished calling my paintings ugly, he said my symbolism was dark and obscure and incomprehensible.”

“So?” I said. “Does that invalidate it, that few can comprehend it? Are you required to make paintings that the masses will enjoy? It’s to hang in the university, not in the train station.”

“True,” said Gustav.

“Someone must have had something good to say,” I said.

“Wickhoff did. He said it was courageous and original. But that doesn’t mean he liked it.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’ve been working too long to give up now. I’ll finish
Medicine
and
Jurisprudence
and hopefully the committee will reconsider or someone else will step forward. They’re too big for a private individual, is the problem. I may have to keep them. It’ll cost me. Others might cancel, too, because of bad publicity.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You might not know that I am going to run a very profitable fashion salon. You’ll be taken care of.”

“You’d support a poor broken-down artist in his old age?” he said. He took my hand and squeezed it.

That night I lay awake for a long time, my body aching for him. I wanted to dress and go to the studio, where he was no doubt awake, working or sitting watch with his painting. I was afraid that I would meet Alma there, or Adele, or worse, someone else. Instead I held him in my mind’s eye and gave myself what pleasure I could.

When things calmed a bit I went to sit for Gustav as he made the sketches for the portrait of me. It took time for us to design a dress, and for me to have it made up. I decided to make a dress like the one I wore to the first Secession exhibition. I took the ideas I had gleaned from Jaeger—the lack of a corset, the jersey fabric, the simple shape—and added some ornamentation of my own.

Designing clothes is all about proportion, the ratio between the neck and waist and the waist and ankle, the length of a sleeve, the height of a collar, or depth of a neckline. I’d always hated mathematics and I was attracted, magpie-like, to things shiny and glittery, but I tried my best. I bought beautiful fabrics that it seemed impossible could make ugly pieces of clothing. I was, of course, wrong. Theoretical designs were all very well, I discovered, but on a human body they were completely transformed. My prototype designs taught me more than any school could have. They were uniformly horrible, and I struggled to understand why. Even Gustav couldn’t really help me. He knew when something looked wrong, and if it were a drawing he would know how to fix it, but he was at a loss to understand needle and thread, seams and placement of armholes.

Little by little I learned to balance top and bottom, front and back. I internalized the mathematical equations that dictated that something was right. I created each piece in my mind, on my own body, backlit so that the silhouette was all I could see. Or I took a piece of fabric and a dressmaker’s dummy and started pinning and unpinning and repinning. The floor of my room was covered with pins, and Pauline would forget and puncture her feet on them. The macabre dummy, headless and stitched up the front and back like a wounded soldier, repeatedly frightened us when we came into the room at night.

After a dozen discarded attempts the dress was finally ready. It was aubergine jersey and skimmed straight and narrow down the body. I made a bolero jacket with blousy sleeves to match. With the dress complete, Gustav had to make room in his schedule for a portrait that wasn’t for a wealthy client. When at last the schedule was cleared, I took the train to Hietzing, stopping in the stores to pick up milk for the cats and chocolates for myself.

While he worked we talked about the workshop he and his friends were putting together. It had all begun because Berta Zuckerkandl had complained to Gustav one night at dinner that her table did not match the art on her walls or reflect her taste. All of her silver was French, ostentatious, and embellished with roses and vines. She swore that if one of her artist friends could make her a very simple silver service, she would pay him handsomely and throw all of her French silver away. Hoffmann replied that while she was at it, she should have some china made as well so she could be rid of her gaudy Sevres plates. From there, helped along by carafes of dry Riesling, they discarded her glassware, her table and chairs, her sideboard, her wallpaper, her rug, her jewelry, and her clothes. They created the Wiener Werkstätte, modeled on the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School. They imagined a pottery studio, a glassworks, a metalworks, a woodworking studio, and a textiles department. Gustav said that since I was already far ahead of them in the fashion department I should work with the artists in charge of it. Perhaps my salon could make up their designs.

Gustav believed, much more than I did, that I would have a salon. It was one thing to look at fabrics with my father, and make myself a dress or two, it was another to rent the space and hire the workers and find the money to do it. He said it would all be easy, and had procured leasing agreements from several sewing machine companies to compare. He had called on three linen mills with me and they had given us their bids. In truth, it would have been difficult to do without him. People were always so much nicer to me when he was along, even if they did not recognize him. They thought he was the money behind the operation, which I suppose he was. He had offered to give me an interest-free loan to start. We were going to try to use local materials and local labor as much as possible. That meant no French silk, but our quality had to be at least as high, or our customers would think our clothes inferior and turn up their noses at them. We were trying for an avant-garde clientele, so it was all right, even preferable, to alienate conventional people. But not so many that we couldn’t turn a profit.

We had lunch in the garden. The cats ate off of our plates and we took turns tossing them away. The cats, of course, not the plates.

“Today we are using the first Hoffmann prototypes,” he said. “What do you think?”

The coffee was in a hammered silver tin that looked less hammered than dented. The pewter receptacles that held butter, cream, and sugar were better; they’d been done in molds. I rearranged the bread and pastry in a careful square on the checkerboarded lacquer tray.

“It’s better this way,” I said. “When do we start designing square food? Can fruits and vegetables be grown square?”

“Brat,” he said. He handed me a cup and saucer of black porcelain rimmed with red squares. “Hoffmann hasn’t slept in about two weeks, painting this china by hand.”

“It’s Greek-like,” I said. “Greekish. Grecian.”

“You sound like you’re conjugating French verbs. Do you like it?”

“I think it’s perfect.”

“Tell him that and he won’t believe you, but he might agree to design your salon,” he said.

At two we went back to work. I had been posing for a half hour or so, and I was daydreaming about another dress I was going to make for myself, out of a gorgeous green peau de soie from Bianchini. I had seen it at a warehouse and immediately coveted it. It was very expensive, but I thought perhaps Gustav might buy the fabric for me for my birthday.

“Did Berta really say she’d let me make her a dress?” I asked. I knew she didn’t care a thing about clothes.

“Not without some persuasion. She said if I designed the print and you made her look twenty pounds lighter, she would wear it to the Opera.”

My sewing wasn’t good enough yet for me to know how to make someone look twenty pounds lighter, but I was sure it could be done. There were a million tricks of drape and cut.

My dress would be a sheath, that would not be too difficult for me. It would have floss of the same color embroidered onto it in a pattern of vines, and then I would have crystals the color of seafoam and aquamarine sewn onto the vines. Maybe someone in the fashion department of the Wiener Werkstätte would know how to make me a pair of matching shoes.