Market research and attitudinal surveys banished backers’ hesitations and doubts by showing irrefutably that there was a potential clientele of such size that it was perfectly reasonable to expect to recoup the investment not in five years and three months, as the preliminary estimates had suggested, but in a mere four years and eight months. Capital came flooding in; in early 1972 the project went operational, and construction work was started on two pilot complexes, Trout and Pemba.
According to Puerto Rican legislation, Marvel Houses International had to spend 1% of its total cash flow on the purchase of contemporary works of art; in most cases, compulsions of this kind in the hotel business usually result in each bedroom having an Indian-ink drawing touched up with watercolour depicting an Atlantic beach resort or a Mediterranean cliff, or else provide the main lobby with some sculptural mini-monument. But Marvel Houses International considered itself duty-bound to devise a more original solution, and after roughing out three or four ideas on paper – building an international museum of modern art in one of the hotel complexes, purchase or commission of twenty-four major works by the twenty-four greatest living artists, establishing a Marvel Houses Foundation giving grant aid to young creators – the directors of Marvel Houses got what was for them a minor problem off their plates by handing it over to an art critic.
Their choice alighted upon Charles-Albert Beyssandre, a Swiss critic of French mother-tongue, a regular columnist for the Feuille d’Avis de Fribourg and the Gazette de Genève, and Zürich correspondent for half a dozen French, Belgian, and Italian dailies and periodicals. The chairman and managing director of International Hostellerie – and thus of Marvel Houses International – was one of his faithful readers and had taken his advice several times on art investments.
Summoned by the Board of Marvel Houses and told of their problem, Charles-Albert Beyssandre had no difficulty in convincing the developers that the solution best fitted to their policy of prestige would be to collect a quite small number of major works: not a museum, nor a rag-bag, certainly not a litho over every bedhead, but a handful of masterpieces jealously secreted in a single spot, which art lovers the world over would dream of gazing at at least once in their lives. Excited at such a prospect, the directors of Marvel Houses entrusted Charles-Albert Beyssandre with the task of collecting these ultraselect items over the following five years.
Beyssandre thus found himself sitting on a budget that was theoretical – final settlements, including his own three per cent commission, were not due until 1976 – but, notwithstanding, colossal: more than five billion old francs, enough to buy the three most valuable paintings in the world, or, as he played around with figuring out in his first few days, enough to buy fifty Klees, almost every single Morandi, almost all of Bacon or practically every Magritte, maybe five hundred Dubuffets, a good score of the best Picassos, a hundred or so Staels, almost the entire output of Frank Stella, almost every Kline and every Klein, all the Rothkos in the Rockefeller collection with all the Huffings in the Fitchwinder and all the Huttings of the haze period (which Beyssandre did not appreciate overmuch anyway) thrown in on the side.
The somewhat puerile exaltation aroused by these calculations soon subsided, and Beyssandre quickly found that his task would be far harder than he had thought.
Beyssandre was a sincere man who loved painting and painters, an attentive, scrupulous, and open man who was happy when, at the end of a session of many hours in a studio or a gallery, he managed to let the unchanging presence of a painting invade his soul, to be filled by the work’s calm and fragile existence, as its concentrated clarity imposed itself on him little by little, transforming the canvas into an almost living thing, a thing bodied forth, a thing there, both simple and complex, bearing the signs of a past history, of a labour, and of a craft finally brought into a shape transcending its difficult, tortuous, and maybe even tortured path of becoming. The task the directors of Marvel Houses had given Beyssandre was clearly mercantile; but at least it might allow him, as he reviewed the art of his time, to have many more of those “magic moments” – the phrase belonged to his Parisian colleague Esberi – and he thus undertook the task with a feeling not far short of enthusiasm.
But news travels fast in the art world, and often gets twisted; it was soon an open secret that Charles-Albert Beyssandre had become the agent of a formidable patron who had hired him to build up the richest private collection of living painters in the world.
After a few weeks Beyssandre realised he wielded power beyond even the size of his budget. The mere idea that the critic might, in certain circumstances, at some unspecified future date, consider purchasing some canvas or other for his super-rich client sent dealers crazy, and the least established talents shot up overnight to the rank of a Cézanne or a Murillo. Just as in the story of the man who had absolutely nothing apart from one hundred-thousand-pound banknote and managed to live on it for a month without touching a penny, so the presence or absence of the critic at an art-world event began to have sensational consequences. As soon as he came into an auction room the bids would begin to climb, and if he left after a quick look around, prices would soften, weaken, slump. As for his column, it became an event awaited with feverish impatience by investors. If he mentioned the first showing of some new painter’s work, the artist would sell the lot in the day, and if he failed to mention an exhibition by a recognised master, collectors would suddenly turn away, resell at a loss, or take down the scorned canvases from their drawing-room walls to hide them in armourplated safes until the day their ranking moved up again.
Very quickly pressure began to be exerted on him. He was smothered in champagne and foie gras; liveried chauffeurs were sent to fetch him in black limousines; then dealers began to mention possible percentages; several reputable architects offered to build him houses, and several interior designers offered to decorate them for him.
For several weeks Beyssandre persevered with his column, believing that the scares and sensations it caused would necessarily subside. Then he tried using various pseudonyms – B. Drapier, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Fred Dannay, M. B. Lee, Sylvander, Ehrich Weiss, Guillaume Porter, etc. – but it was almost worse, because dealers now thought they could identify him behind any unfamiliar signature, and inexplicable turmoils continued to rock the art market long after Beyssandre had entirely given up writing and had announced the fact in full-page displays in all the papers he had ever worked for.
The following months were the hardest for him: he had to stop himself going into sale rooms and attending private views; he took elaborate precautions to visit galleries, but each time his incognito was blown it set off disastrous repercussions, and he ended up choosing to abandon all public appearances; henceforth he visited only artists’ studios; he would ask the artist to show him what he reckoned to be his five best works and to leave him alone with them for at least an hour.
Two years later, he had visited more than two thousand studios dotted around ninety-one cities in twenty-three countries. His problem now was to reread his notes and to make his selection: one of the directors of International Hostellerie generously gave him free use of a chalet in the Grisons, and he went there to think over the strange task he had been given, and the curious side effects that had ensued from it. And it was at about this time, as he gazed on a landscape of glaciers with only cows ringing their low-pitched bells for company and reflected on the meaning of art, that he heard of Bartlebooth’s adventure.
He learnt of it quite by chance as he was preparing to light a fire with a two-year old issue of the St Moritz Latest News, a local rag giving resort gossip twice a week during the winter season: Olivia and Rémi Rorschach had spent ten days at the Engadiner hotel, and each of them had been entitled to an interview:
– Rémi Rorschach, can you tell us what your current projects are?
– I’ve been told the story of a man who went round the world to paint pictures, and then had them scientifically destroyed. I think I’d quite like to make
a film about it …
The résumé was thin and erroneous, but just the thing to arouse Beyssandre’s interest. And when the art critic got wind of the thing in greater detail, the Englishman’s project fired his enthusiasm. Then, very quickly, Beyssandre made his decision: those very works which their author absolutely wished to destroy would be the most precious jewels in the rarest collection in the world.
Bartlebooth received Beyssandre’s first letter in early April 1974. By then all he could read were banner headlines, so Smautf read the letter to him. In it, the critic told his own story in detail, explaining how he had reached the view that those watercolours cut into so many jigsaws should be treated as works of art, a destiny which their begetter wished to deny them: whereas artists and their dealers the world over had been dreaming for months of getting one of their products into the fabulous Marvel Houses collection, he was offering the only man who wanted neither to show nor to keep his own work the sum of ten million dollars for the purchase of what he had left!
Bartlebooth asked Smautf to tear up the letter, to return any more that might come without opening them, and not to let the signatory enter if perchance he were to turn up.
For three months Beyssandre wrote, rang in, and rang on the doorbell to no avail. Then on 11 July he called on Smautf in his bedroom and instructed him to warn his master that he was making a declaration of war: Bartlebooth might think art consisted in destroying the works he had brought into being, but he, Beyssandre, considered that art consisted of saving one or more of these works at any price, and he defied the stubborn Englishman to stop him doing so.
Bartlebooth was sufficiently aware, if only from having experienced it himself, of the havoc that passion may wreak on the most sensible people, to know that the critic’s words were no idle threat. The simplest precaution would have been to avoid any risk with the reconstituted watercolours by abandoning their systematic destruction on the very site where they had been painted long ago. But that would be to misjudge Bartlebooth: when challenged, he would face the challenge, and the watercolours would continue to be conveyed, as they always had been conveyed, to their place of origin to return to the blank whiteness of their original non-being.
This final phase of the great plan had always been carried out with much less rigidity than the prior stages. In the early years, Bartlebooth himself would deal with the operation when the sites were no more than a couple of plane or train rides away; a little later, Smautf took over, and then, when the places concerned became more and more distant, the custom arose of mailing the watercolours to the correspondents in situ whom Bartlebooth had contacted at the time, or to their successors; each watercolour was sent with a phial of special solvent, a detailed map showing exactly where the thing was to be done, an explanatory note, and a signed letter from Bartlebooth kindly requesting the said correspondent to be so good as to perform the destruction of the enclosed watercolour in accordance with the instructions contained in the explanatory note and, on completion of the operation, to send back to him the sheet of paper returned to its blank virginity. Up until then the procedure had worked as planned, and ten or fifteen days later Bartlebooth would receive his blank sheet, and it had never even occurred to him that anyone might have just pretended to destroy the watercolour and sent him back another sheet, which he checked up on nonetheless by making sure that all these sheets – especially made for him – did indeed bear his watermark and the tiny traces of Winckler’s cutting lines.
Bartlebooth contemplated several answers to Beyssandre’s attack. The most efficient would no doubt have been to entrust an associate with the task of destroying the watercolours and to give him a bodyguard escort. But where could he find such a trustworthy associate, now he was up against the almost unlimited power the critic had at his disposal? Bartlebooth trusted only Smautf completely, and Smautf was much too old; and what was more, the billionaire had neglected his inheritance for fifty years in favour of ensuring the success of his project and had left it more and more in the hands of his business advisers, and so he would not even have had the resources to provide his old servant with such costly protection.
After long hesitation, Bartlebooth asked to see Rorschach. No one knows how he got him to collaborate, but it was at all events through the producer’s good offices that he was able to entrust television crews leaving on assignments in the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf with the task of destroying his watercolours in the customary way, and of filming the destruction.
For several months this system worked without too much trouble. On the eve of departure, the cameraman would receive the watercolour to be destroyed and a sealed box containing one hundred and twenty metres of reversible film, that is to say celluloid producing a positive image when developed without an intermediate negative stage. Smautf and Kléber would go to the airport to collect from the returning cameraman the now blank watercolour and the exposed celluloid which they would take directly to a laboratory. The same evening or, at the latest, next day Bartlebooth would view the film on a 16mm projector set up in the antechamber. Then he would have the film burnt.
Various incidents that could not easily be ascribed to chance proved nonetheless that Beyssandre had not given up. He was definitely responsible for the burglary that occurred in the flat of Robert Cravennat, the chemistry lab technician who had been dealing with the resolidification of the puzzles since Morellet’s accident in 1960, and for the attempted arson which nearly caused a devastating fire in Guyomard’s studio. Bartlebooth’s sight had been getting worse and worse, and he was getting ever further behind in his schedule, so Cravennat had no puzzle in his flat that fortnight; as for Guyomard, he extinguished the petrol-soaked rags which were intended to start the fire, before whoever lit them could take advantage of the situation to steal the watercolour the restorer had just received.
But it would take much more than that to put Beyssandre off. Just over two months ago, on the twenty-fifth of April 1975, in the same week that Bartlebooth lost his eyesight for good, the inevitable finally happened: the documentary crew that had gone to Turkey, and whose cameraman was due to go to Trabzon to perform the destruction of Bartlebooth’s four hundred and thirty-eighth watercolour (the Englishman was now sixteen months behind schedule), failed to return: two days later news came that the four crewmen had died in a mysterious car accident.
Bartlebooth decided to give up his ritual destructions; henceforth, completed puzzles would no longer be reglued, separated from their backing, and soaked in a solvent from which the sheet of paper would emerge entirely white, but simply put back in Madame Hourcade’s black box and thrown into an incinerator. This decision came too late in the day to be of any use, for Bartlebooth would never complete the puzzle he began that week.
A few days later, Smautf read in a newspaper that Marvel Houses International, a subsidiary of Marvel Houses Incorporated and International Hostellerie, was being wound up. Fresh estimates had shown that in view of increased construction costs, amortisation of the twenty-four culture parks would take not four years and eight months, nor even five years and three months, but six years and two months; the major backers had taken fright and withdrawn their capital, to invest it in a gigantic scheme to tow icebergs. The Marvel Houses programme was suspended sine die. As for Beyssandre, he was never heard of again.
1 The USA seems to have been selected twice – Artesia and Orlando – contrary to the decision to build the twenty-four centres in twenty-four different countries; but, as one of the directors of Marvel Houses pointed out very relevantly, Orlando is only superficially located in the United States, in the sense that Disney World is a world of its own, a world in which Marvel Houses and International Hostellerie had a duty to be represented.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Altamont, 5
IN THE MAIN drawing room of the Altamonts’ flat, two servants are putting the finishing touches to a reception they have laid out. One is a strapping Negro wearing his Louis XV livery with
unconstrained ease – green pin-striped waistcoat and breeches, green cotton hose, and silver-buckled shoes – and lifting with no evident strain a three-seater sofa of dark-red varnished wood with foliate decorations and inlaid mother-of-pearl, adorned with chintz-covered cushions. The other, a sallow-skinned butler with a bulging Adam’s apple, dressed in a slightly oversize black tuxedo, is laying out on a long marble-topped sideboard against the right-hand wall several large silver-plate dishes laden with small-cut sandwiches: red tongue, salmon roe, Swiss smoked beef, smoked eel, asparagus tips, etc.
On the wall above the sideboard hang two pictures signed by J. T. Maston, a genre painter of English origin who spent much of his life in Central America and became well known at the beginning of this century. The first picture, entitled The Apothecary, depicts a bald man in a greenish cloak, with eyeglasses perched on his nose and a huge wart afflicting his forehead, at the back of a gloomy store full of large cylindrical jars, apparently attempting with great difficulty to decipher a prescription. The second, entitled The Naturalist, shows an energetic-looking man, skinny and dry, with a beard cut in the American fashion, that is to say with bushy hair under the chin. Standing with arms folded, he is watching the torment of a small squirrel imprisoned in a close-knit web hung between two giant liriodendrons and woven by a hideous beast as big as a pigeon’s egg and endowed with huge paws.