Atlantis: Three Tales

  Nagy was the perfect television artist: he wore plaid shirts, dress slacks—never jeans. Often he made his entrance smoking a pipe. Sometimes he even rolled up his sleeves. He had a beard—a small, neat one. Everything about him was redolent of autumns on Provincetown beaches. He had an oboe of a voice, and his bearing was that of your most sympathetic summer camp counselor. The show was aimed wholly at making pictures that looked like something. Weekly he went over those principles that have organized Western figurative drawing and painting since the Renaissance: vanishing points, horizon lines, one-and two-point perspective. (“For objects sitting on the ground or parallel with it, the vanishing point—or points—are on the horizon, which is always at about eye level, even if it’s behind a hill or a house. Always sketch it in, however lightly. And even if you don’t, always be aware of where the horizon line is in your picture . . .” What a revelation for the nine-year-old sketcher of city streets and Central Park paths!) The program’s teaching plan was wholly imitative. Nagy had his sketch pad, his pencil, his eraser, and—mysteriously and most importantly—his paper stomp. (Could anyone draw anything without a paper stomp? Apparently Nagy didn’t think so.) You had your sketch pad, pencil, eraser—and used your fingertip for the stomped-in shading (then got prints all over the rest of the page). Nagy would draw a line or a shape; you would draw that line or that shape. (“If it doesn’t look exactly like mine, don’t worry. Just relax and do the best you can. You’ll still be surprised at the results.”) And at half an hour’s end, both Nagy and you would have a basket of flowers on a table, a boat hulk beached against a grassy dune (like I said, P-town), a dog sitting before a fireplace, or a small house at the end of a path among the trees and hills.

  Two or three times, Nagy actually had a young woman sit and model for him, while he, I, and how-many-thousand-more New Yorkers spent Saturday morning “trying for a likeness.” There was much analysis of the young woman’s head into those eternal basic forms; and he would point out how the rectangular solid that made up the lower part of her jaw was much longer than the one that made up the lower part of his.

  By program’s end, we both had faces on our sketch pads. But neither was much of a likeness. “Well,” Nagy mused on the screen, regarding his sketch, clearly dissatisfied, “to get a likeness in a half an hour—with ten minutes out for commercials—is difficult.” (His show, too, was live.) “If you want to do this kind of thing, figure on spending an hour, an hour-and-a-half at it. Maybe even longer, at least when you start.”

  Another revelation!

  Now, beginning artists throughout the city had an idea of the duration of the task we’d undertaken—and an example from the internationally known Nagy himself of what would happen if you rushed it.

  After the show, my younger sister and I would chase each other up and down the stairs, from the second to the third floor, bawling at one another, “Salagodoola! Menchicka Boola! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo—!” unaware that the song’s writer was the same Walt Disney staff musician who, twenty years before, had written “Mairzy Doats.”

  Our art program at school was, however, entirely different. The move from Third Grade to Fourth Grade—from the heights of the Lower School to the bottom rung of the Middle School—was, at least for me, primarily the move from art classes with Miss Dorothy Andrews, a tall, black-haired woman with a bun, who wore dark turtlenecks and long gray jumpers, but with a wholly open and experimental policy as far as the art room was concerned (whose limits I only strained once when, in my earliest years, I took off my shoes and socks and painted both my feet blue: it was reported to my parents), to art classes with Gwendolin Davies, an irrepressible woman with an English accent, bright red hair, cool-colored sweaters, and frequently some enormous piece of free-form aluminum jewelry. Older students had storied her eccentricities to us by then, so that on our first day in the new art room we were all expectant.

  “No, no!” Gwenny said (we already knew we were to call her that), as some of us made tentative moves toward the paper piled on the shelves and the paint cans on the counter—as would have been proper the year before, upstairs with Miss Andrews. “We’re going to talk a bit, first. Find a seat, now. That’s right, you can sit over there. Up on the counter with you. And you lot can sit over there under the window—that’s right. No talking now; we’re big Middle Schoolers and quite grown up, all of us—aren’t we? So let’s have some attention here!”

  Here, apparently, not only were we going to make art; we were going to discuss it.

  Once the dozen of us were seated and silent, Gwenny clapped her hands together with the sober-eyed satisfaction of someone who had just created a masterpiece. “Now—” (We were perched around the room, some on the shelf running under the window, some on the waist-high table with cabinets beneath, down the room’s center.) “I have a question for you. What is a picture made of?”

  On shelves to the side were rows of clay and wire sculptures, piles of finished watercolors.

  “Has the cat got your tongue?” she demanded of one of us. “It must. You’re not saying anything. Now, tell me. What goes into a picture?”

  The gravity with which she put the question made it clear that she did not want an answer such as dogs, cats, or flowers. From my seat under the ridged wire window guard, I raised my hand.

  “Yes . . . ?”

  I ventured: “The horizon line—?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  The crisp denial startled me. However tentatively I’d given my answer, I’d expected praise.

  But Gwenny went on. “Horizon lines, one- and two-point perspective, incident light, reflected light, isometric projections—that sort of thing: that’s precisely what we are not interested in, in this class!” She glared at me. “And I never want to hear you mention them in here again!” Then, incongruously, she smiled: “All right?”

  Bewildered, I nodded.

  “Good!”

  Today I wonder whether Gwenny had ever caught Nagy’s Saturday morning show, to loathe it for the anti-art experience it was.

  At the time, though, I was only awed by her knowledge: Nagy had never mentioned anything so complex as “isometric projections.” “Incident light . . . ?” What, I wondered, could they possibly be; and why were they not for us?

  “Now.” She turned to the rest of the room. “Can somebody do a little better than that? What goes into a picture? Someone else. Tell me . . . What? No idea? Well, it’s not an easy question. But, here—I’ve got a piece of paper, all tacked up. And I’m going to make a picture.” She picked up a crayon and rapidly drew an informal amoeboid line that came back to close on itself. “What’s that?”

  Was it Debbie, with her pale blond hair, who volunteered from where she sat cross-legged on the central counter, “It’s . . . just a kind of . . . shape?”

  “Very good!” Gwenny whirled about, practically to incandesce! “What was that word again?”

  But Debbie was as nonplussed by her success as I’d been by my failure.

  “You had it right!” Gwenny declared. “Just say the word once more!” But it was someone else who finally offered: “. . . shape?”

  “Correct!” Gwenny turned back to the paper. “And here’s another one!” She drew a circle. “And here’s another!” She drew a triangle. “And another!” The outline this time, drawn with a sureness that shamed Nagy, was of a child: we laughed. “And another!” This one was of such intricate complexity, with so many inroads and curlicues, peaks, dells, and harbors, it made both child and amoeba look circle-simple. “And another!” Another circle, but with two points near the top. Adding a few whisker strokes and some eye dots, Gwenny turned it into a lopsided cat’s face. We laughed again. “Shapes. Lots of different shapes. All there in my picture.” She stepped back from the paper tacked to the painted wallboard, galaxies of tack holes across its gray enamel. “So—what is one thing that goes into a picture?”

  We smiled, but we were still—at least I was—confused.

  “After
all this,” Gwenny said, “you must have figured it out. I’ve told you ten times, now.”

  So, very tentatively, someone said: “Shapes . . .”

  “Absolutely!” She closed her eyes and breathed in as though she were scenting a fire—that suddenly turned to roses. She opened her eyes again. “It’s very hard to make a picture that doesn’t have any shapes in it at all. So, let’s all say it together. What is one of the things that makes a picture?”

  This time, we cried out, emboldened by unison: “Shapes!”

  “Well, then, you’re not such a bunch of little wooden noggins! I was beginning to wonder.” It wasn’t like a Nagy lesson at all. We were grinning now. “At least one of the things that makes up a picture is . . . shape.” She turned back to thumbtack up another yard-wide piece of drawing paper over the first. “But what else goes into a picture?”

  We were silenced again. I couldn’t think of anything else of the same basic import.

  Suddenly Gwenny raised her crayon and put a diagonal slash across the off-white sheet. “What’s that?”

  Wanting to redeem my previous failure, I raised my hand.

  “Yes . . . ?”

  “That divides the picture up into two shapes,” I said with analytic certainty.

  “Oh, I can tell,” she said. “You’re going to be a scientist. But you’re in an art class now.” She looked at me sternly. “You see, what I want to know is: what is it that does the dividing?” And she was looking around for another hand.

  I’d failed again.

  But nobody else answered either.

  “Well,” she said, making another slash across the paper, “what’s that?” She made still another—only this one was a wavery curve. “And that.” It was kind of a squiggle. “And that.” The next was a longer, softer curve.

  Someone had apparently gotten the idea and called out: “Lines!”

  Gwenny loped across the room, grabbed the very startled boy by both cheeks. (For an instant I thought she was about to strike him for some unimaginable infraction!) She kissed his forehead loudly. “Yes, my little strawberry-custard confection! Lines!” She stepped back to clasp her hands again. “That’s exactly what they are!” For a moment, the rest of us were as startled as he. Then, once more, we laughed. But Gwenny had our attention, and as soon as she spoke again we fell into (anxious) quiet. “So, we have two things now that go to make up a picture: shapes and lines. But there must be something else.” She furrowed her face, began to pull at her chin. Walking slowly by the low counter where the gallon cans of watercolors stood on their ledge, circled with stalactites of lazuli and alizarin, she gazed into them. “I wonder . . . what . . . it . . . could . . . be?”

  The stripped-down quality of her esthetic had registered. (I had my own suspicion as to the answer, but I’d failed twice and wasn’t going to be caught out a third time.) Someone called out: “Paint!”

  “Paint?” Gwenny pondered the paint pots. “But what do we put the paint on a picture for? What do we use the paint to achieve?”

  Why I blurted it through my initial hesitations I don’t know: “Color . . . !”

  Gwenny looked up at me, scarlet-nailed hand splayed across her mouth in glaring astonishment. Then the hand swung out toward me, over the class’s heads, and the gesture became a grandly blown kiss, as flamboyant as any by fat, black Rose Murphy. “Color . . . ! Yes, color! I kiss you too, my little mocha eclair!” (In my seat under the window I went tumbling down into the pools of hopeless devotion to this brazen-voiced redhead.) “How could we have pictures without colors! So—” she addressed the whole class once more—“we have three things that make up a picture. What are they, now—?”

  Shape, line, and color . . .

  “What are they, again?”

  Shape, line, and color!

  “Once more . . .”

  Shape, line, and color!

  What I knew was that we were chanting and having great fun doing it. What I didn’t know was that we were inscribing the tenets of a formalist esthetic on the pedestal of our souls.

  In the essay from which I’ve taken my epigraph, Calvin Tomkins locates the same three terms in the same order to describe the esthetic of minimalism—that austere outgrowth of abstract expressionism that came to the fore in the late sixties, once the first furor over pop art had died down. But it was back in September of 1951 that these three terms rang out in the art room on the sixth floor at 89th Street—as they had rung for a handful of Septembers already.

  “But there’s still one problem,” Gwenny returned to the tacked-up paper. “How do we put the shapes, lines, and colors together in our pictures?”

  “With a brush!” someone volunteered, brightly.

  “With a brush!” Gwenny declared, darkly.

  Then she repeated, “With a brush . . .”

  Now she made a sour face: “With a brush . . .”

  Breathlessly we waited to see what these accents meant.

  It was disdain, but what sort none of us knew.

  “With a brush . . . ?” Gwenny shook her head. “Oh, you’re just too clever by half!” Again she took up the crayon. “Pay attention now. Because this isn’t easy. I’m going to put a shape in my picture. But do I put it up here, like this—?” She drew another amoeboid, but it began in the corner, and in a moment she was drawing off the paper and on the wall itself.

  “No!” we chorused.

  “Well, why not?”

  Someone called: “Because it goes off the paper!”

  “Yes,” Gwenny admitted. “But I want you to say that in another way.”

  So we tried for a while. Pretty soon we came up with, “It goes over the edge.”

  “And what edge is that?” Gwenny prompted.

  A minute later, we’d ascertained that it was the outside edge of the picture that was her perimeter of concern.

  “So, once more. What is it that makes up a picture?” Shape, line, and color! (We knew we were to chant it with her and came in on cue.) “And how do we arrange them, in order to make it a picture?” (By now we knew the second part of it too.) “In relationship to the outside edge! That’s wonderful. Now, go, loves, and spend the rest of the period making just the most beautiful paintings in the world!”

  We broke from our seats for the paints and papers around us that, for the last ten minutes of Gwenny’s lesson, I, for one, had been itching for.

  I was a little surprised just how single-minded Gwenny was about her formalism. While I was looking at my own edge, looking at my paints, and arranging blue, green, and brown expressionist blobs as carefully as I could, Debbie came up to her and asked for help in painting a . . . cat. As I overheard and watched from my eye’s corner (while I worked on my own abstraction), I wondered if cats were not as forbidden here as horizon lines. But before the paper spread out on the counter next to mine, Gwenny stood beside Debbie’s shoulder and said, “Now, you’ve got your color. You’ve got your paper. You want to paint a cat. But basically, you’re going to put a shape on your paper—if it’s a cat shape, that’s certainly all right with me. But run your eyes all around the outside edge—go ahead, do it, look at it. Now think about the shape you’re going to put there. Is it going to be a little tiny shape like this . . . ?” Gwen balled up her knuckle and put it down in one corner of the paper.

  “No . . . !” Debbie laughed.

  “Is it going to be a great big shape like this . . . ?” With both hands Gwenny outlined a form even bigger than the paper.

  “No!” Debbie protested; she was really a very serious girl. “I won’t get it all in!”

  “Well, you just look at that outside edge, think about your cat shape. Then you put it down.”

  Debbie bit her lip—and looked up, down, sideways. A moment later, she turned her paper around ninety degrees, so that it was the long way, and began to paint a large green tabby.

  Soon I learned, though, that despite her formalism, Gwenny would acknowledge talent even when it came in late-romantic terms. I di
d the required abstract pictures and got a fair amount of praise for them. But a year later, without prelude, I turned to a figurative subject: my own, I thought. But the technique was pure Nagy, supplemented by what I’d learned of color modeling from a thick book that sat on my cousin Boyd’s desk in his refinished attic bedroom out in New Jersey. Illustration, by Andrew Loomis, was full of color charts and composition diagrams. It was called Illustration, but what Loomis really wanted to teach his readers was how to paint pin-up girls and athletes, neither of which, as picture topics, particularly excited me. Still, it was only a step away from the comic book art of Frazetta, Williamson, Krenkel, and Wood that was my first, visual love. So, in one corner of the busy art room, with just a little sketching that only one student noticed, I began a picture of a mighty-muscled potentate, seated on his throne, turned three-quarters face—which Loomis had explained was far more dramatic than a full front or full profile—chin on his fist and looking stern. His robes trailed the throne steps. Rising columns and smoking braziers loomed in the foreground.

  “What are you drawing it first for?”

  “Nothing.” But I was sketching it first because that’s what Loomis said you should do (emphasizing that you not put in much detail, but only basic forms), though I was sure Gwenny, who by now had also told us about “love of the materials,” wouldn’t have countenanced it.

  The setting had come from one of Mr. Loomis’s harem scenes, odalisques banished and replaced by a hulking body builder I’d glimpsed inside a newsstand muscle magazine, where, somehow, the focus on the gleaming shoulders and shadowed belly had been sharp enough for me to notice on the great blocky fist that the lowering Hercules bit his nails. From my terror of homoerotic sexual discovery, in this school version I’d clothed him a bit better. But the background was Loomis’s arches, windows, and steps, only with his bevy of busty, gauzily-veiled maidens removed. The foreground columns and braziers were Loomis’s as well. (Probably he’d swiped both from Parish or Alma Tedema.) Emptied of Loomis’s sexual symbols (and replaced, yes, with my own), the picture was one I’d tried in my sketchbook half a dozen times over spring vacation back in Jersey. But now, in the sixth-floor art room, as I painted at my wholly borrowed amalgam of visual clichés, not only did the students crowd around, but finally Gwenny pushed up to see what I was doing and pronounced with some surprise: “That’s really very beautiful!”