ART ATMOSPHERE
My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. She bowed down and worshipped Whistler six months or so before the rest of humanity reached the adoration stage; and when she heard that he had opened a studio for “lady students” available to any one who would pay the entrance-fee—“just like one of the second-raters who teach at Carlorossi’s”—she lost no time in making tracks for the Passage Stanislas, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler studio was situated.
It was, just as rumor had said, like all other studio-classes of that sort, except that the fee was many times larger; but that was legitimate, Whistler being the thing that winter, and the thing always commanding a high price in the open market.
It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with a big sky-light towards the north. In it sat some twenty or thirty more-or-less-young ladies, most of them Americans (the fee was really very large) enveloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They sat, as always in such studio-classes, in a circle around a platform, on which stood the model.
Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the Master” drove up in a cab, made his way into the room amid palpable emanations of awe, and going from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head of each acolyte a little of the sacred fire of his genius.
My cousin Angelica, like the others, found this a more than satisfactory arrangement and considered that she received full value for her money. We heard little from her that winter but enthusiasm over the Whistler atmosphere and scorn of everything else. In any exhibition she was to be found in ecstasy before some barely visible human visage sunk in the gloom of a dusky corner at twilight, or a floating, whitish blur or two on a dark-blue canvas, which, she told us, represented the new artistic tradition, worth all the other artistic traditions produced since they carried the Cimabue Madonna through the streets—or was that a Giotto?
I was studying philology that year and had no quarrel with Angelica about that sort of thing. For all I cared, she could give her adherence to whichever artistic tradition took her fancy for the moment. But it was occasionally inconvenient to have her so slavishly tied to the studio-class on the days when they expected a criticism. Nothing could have tempted her away from one of those marvelous opportunities to profit by first-hand personal instruction from a first-rate living genius. Even when our one prosperous relative, Uncle Frederick, came through Paris and invited us over to the Right Bank to go to lunch with him at a fearfully expensive restaurant, and to sit in a fearfully expensive loge at the Français afterwards, Angelica had to go first to the studio.
I went with her, so that I could carry her off directly afterwards. This is what I saw and heard in the hour I spent there.
The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that morning light.
Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the canvases on their easels.
They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch.
“We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself.
Presently he came. The door swung open, I caught a glimpse of the concierge performing the impossible in the way of holding the door open and effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in came a dapper, immaculately dressed little old gentleman, with gray gloves and pearl-gray gaiters.
The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to the floor (or at least that is the impression they made on me in the first intense emotion of his entrance) and then stiffened to attention before their easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping pearls and rubies.
The little old gentleman advanced with small, gentlemanly steps to the first of the easels, and contemplated the leather-brown South-Sea-Islander depicted on it. Every one of the students held her breath. So did I.
He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. Then with the traditional studio gesture I had seen all my life in studios—outstretched thumb, modeling in the air—he began saying what I had heard all my life in studios, “A little more shadow on the shoulder, I should say. And perhaps.... Yes, go into the modeling of that arm more deeply. On the whole very promising, very interesting.”
He passed on to the next easel. One felt another devout heart turn over with a rustle. “Good! Well felt, that knee. But lacking in distinction, perhaps, the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling of the hands more deeply.”
He passed to the next. And the next. And the next. I heard a murmur of “Very promising ... very interesting ... deeper feeling about ... keep it flat ... subtle ... relations of planes not quite ... very promising ... very interesting.”
In half an hour it was over. He walked neatly back to the door, which the nearest student sprang to open, and with a courteous bow all around he disappeared, his face imperturbable to the last. If he lifted a cynical eyebrow in amusement, it was not till after the door had closed upon him.
Angelica and I were now free to go, and I proceeded to the difficult undertaking of cutting her out from the herd of art-students milling excitedly around and around before the canvases, “Did you hear what he said about my shoulder-blade?” “This was the plane he liked on my back.” “He didn’t object to the treatment of my ...”
The model, however, showed an imperturbability as complete as that of the Master. Like him, she had earned her pay for a morning’s work. As the door had closed on him, she had climbed down off the platform, and she was now calmly pulling her chemise on over her red head.
Angelica was still a little wild-eyed and emotional when we emerged on the street. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she said, clutching at my arm. “Can’t you understand now what a privilege it is to ...” She took ten minutes to blow off this high-pressure steam and come down to little wandering puffs like, “It means so much to have such precious contacts!” And, “You simply take it in through your pores when you are in the real art atmosphere.”
Understand me, please, I do not venture to affirm that this is really all that took place. I am no art-student and never was. There may have been oceans more. But this is all that I saw.