Sara Barrett's story of a notorious woman who keeps a mystery painting in her attic.
By Sara Barrett
Objects can have powerful associations. The things we keep, or discard, reveal telling choices. Art, especially, is a vivid manifestation of the subconscious. If an artist becomes an infamous enigma, we look for answers in their art. But what are the motives of the collector? Read the story of one mysterious painting.
I was infamous once, by association, but now I am an old woman and my life goes by unnoticed. I never watch the news, I attend my art classes, I walk my dog. When I sit on the edge of the group, at my easel in the corner, I study the naked muscles of the strong young mensch in silence. It would be a religious celebration, this contemplation of youthful physical purity, had I not cast off my religion long ago. None of my classmates could guess how carefully my history has been over painted. Even my first language, the harsh consonants of the land of my fathers, has been scumbled out by time and training.
One of my collection, ‘Bluebells in the Clearing’, was painted by another hand. It lies flat, high up, on a platform of planks in the rafters. I don’t think of it often, but I am aware that it is there. Like my identity, it is covered, dusty, under wraps. I have made attempts to shuffle it on, palm it off, but no one took up the offer. They were ignorant of its origins, unappreciative of its author. That knowledge is my secret.
Back in '45, I tried to find a home for 'Bluebells in the Clearing'. The close circle who knew the artist, a doctor and my erstwhile lover, all declined.
‘The large canvas?’ they would reply, ’No. It’s not that we don’t like it, it was one of his best, but it’s so large, so unwieldy. We couldn't take it with us. We don't have room. It's not possible.’ Our old friends needed to travel light, and fast, back then.
I understood. The painting is as cumbersome as the truth behind it. It is also, like the truth, recurrently inconvenient. For a start, the canvas is triangular, which is an awkward shape to hang, or store. (The doctor liked to experiment.) At first, before the facts became public, when I was loyal still, I imagined positioning the angular canvas in various places in my new home: behind doors; on landings; beside bookcases. Technically on view, but concealed. My eye was drawn to the strange perspective, the sharp corners. The picture jarred. Any pleasant arrangement or diverting pattern placed beside it was immediately disrupted. I realised I could not co-exist peacefully with the painting, so I moved it to the spare room.
The doctor's widow was not offered ‘Bluebells in the Clearing’. She was my rival, back then.
‘I don't care for it,' I heard her once remark. 'All those flowers are too much, all lined up in ranks.’
Later, they reminded her of the furtive blue wreaths his sisters sent, her mist of grief, the wave of truth, breaking. They say the wife is always the last to know. I was his secretary. I knew. It was my job to know, to adjust the picture, to sift the past, compose the present and arrange the future. I was just eighteen then and I'm still busy doing it.
When I moved continents, years later, to an alien, inhospitable land, the painting came with me. I stored it by the coat rack in the corridor of my cold little English house, propped in a transitional space. It was a wonder no one put a foot through it, but somehow it stayed intact. One day, I ran into an old relative of the artist. We shared kaffee und kuchen, became lovers, until the pain of shared zeitgeist became too much to bear.
He killed himself two years later, hunted down in Brazil, I heard. He was a man who had appreciated art.
‘It’s a good composition, certainly,’ he had said, ‘finely crafted, thoughtful, interesting in many ways, but I’m not sure I could live with all that blue.’
Blue is the dominant colour; it soaks the triangle with a slow gradation, starting at the foot with a dark swathe of blue flowers tapering up through blue-green foliage to the distant blue-black trees at the tip. Blue was his colour. It was an army-family thing, the relative said. Each of the children, the two brothers and two sisters, were given a colour, to track them back to their dirty plates and mugs, scarves and socks. In his case, the colour ran deep like pigment. It explained a lot. All that blue is hard to live with. I can attest to it.
Once, back when I was allowed to drive, I took the painting as far as the tip. I drove all the way there and lurked near the entrance, engine running. But when I imagined myself lifting it, dropping it, physically, finally, into one of those huge filthy skips, I could not do it. I had no right. It was the enigmatic remnant of a famous man and I was its curator. The bluebells yearned towards beauty, surely. The frantic brush strokes were signs of skill, not an obsessional mind. The painting did not belong with all the old shoes and sharp grey junk in a landfill site, buried and forgotten. Whatever he had done. A sense of history turned me round and I brought it back, stowed it quickly in a dustsheet, up in the rafters, out of sight. Someone, one day, would understand.
After my breakdown, I aged a thousand years. As time went by, as I excavated and cleared the rest of my past, the painting lingered, but I had changed towards it. The bluebell scene began to cloy, chocolate-box sweet, incongruous, given the psyche that shaped it. It sickened me. I thought a charity shop, one of those voluntary processing plants for the effects of the dear departed, would do me a favour and pass it on.
‘I’m afraid we aren’t allowed to take books or pictures these days, there’s no call for them,’ the lady said. 'Only clothes and small items.' I put the painting in the garage.
Tied to a thing of such unyielding proportions, what could I do? Face it? I loved him. I helped him. I collaborated. I returned to the canvas again and again, and imagined hubris in the ordered ranks of bluebell stems, projected meaning in the bowed flower heads, the blurred edges of the blue-green leaves. I scanned for signs of dark-hearted denial between the black receding trees. Let me tell you, I looked hard. I found nothing. The painting gives nothing back. No insight. I accept this now, and store it high up like a dangerous relic, on a platform of planks in my rafters, covered, dusty, under wraps. I have learned to affect neutrality towards it, to cultivate indifference.
One day, when I am dead, someone will unwrap the canvas, brush the dust off the layered surface and pick up a hint of cool serenity. I tell myself, one day, ‘Bluebells in the Clearing' will find a context where it finally fits. Truth, Beauty and Justice will always be an uncompromising triangle. But time will fade the painting; room will be found for it alongside the rest of life’s chaotic clutter. The small initials in the corner, H.M, aka Dr Heinz Münch, will no longer conjure images of Dachau. Eventually, it will just be what it is; a bad painting.
Someone will have the courage to burn it.
