The museum fell silent

I can only just recall that first visit to his home. He was not there—being some several years dead—but the house was intact. A white exterior led to a dark vestibule. To the right, a studio was still arranged with his belongings. The impressions that the mind retains are unpredictable. A green bottle from which water was poured into glasses on a silver tray. A yellow window with the blue of the sea outside. A sense of discomfort that lessened only slightly after time. Yet the house itself held something more intractable, the feeling of a party that had long since ended.

Over the following years I spent many hours in this house. Even then in its quiet, uninhabited state, the life it had held was palpable. It was a vast place, almost labyrinthine, and on each visit it seemed to expand. As trust was gained, doors were opened. Each turn of a lock revealed another aspect of the artist. Gradually, I felt I came to know him.

Perhaps it is strange that one can come to know a person without ever knowing them at all, but by a kind of osmosis, spending time in their home, among their things, with their family. But I did feel that I came to know him and, perhaps, even to love him. His innocence and idiosyncrasy, the bohemianism which now seems so impossible. These things resonated with me. His shyness and strangeness, too, are things I felt in myself. In these ways he was a perfect subject. A body I could slip into as easily as my own.

The relationship between artist and curator is not often explored. In my experience, a curator sees their role as memorialiser, biographer, keeper of culture; a circular and intensifying catch-all that in its nebulousness and expanding state cannot help but be regarded as a kind of vocation. Is it any wonder, then, that it can be so hard to tear oneself away from a subject without whom they would not exist?

But critically speaking—forming an outline of an absent artist, even one with whom you identify, entails leaning heavily on those who knew them, or claimed to. There were many people I met in those years. Most of them with a work of art, given as presents or payment. Slowly the oeuvre was reassembled. They helped me to piece him together. But I was conscious, too, of what they generally called his ‘mercurial nature’ and the depth with which his comments, years later, seemed to cut. The ways in which they carried the slights and hurt so adroitly beside the love.

In retrospect, there were other signs. Drawings taken surreptitiously out of reach. A comment made in confidence, away from the others. The reluctance of a young woman to speak with me direct. But when it all came out I was genuinely shocked. That word rings so hollow, sounds mawkish, naïve; this next point even more so—I remember crying, for her and for him and perhaps a little for myself, because this person whom I had come to love for their light and beauty had done something so obscene. I flinch at that word. Sometimes I struggle with it, too, uncertain of its depth and of what it might really contain.

The terms in which she described the crime against her took the form of a poem. It was written in fragments. It had the sense of something broken. But even when a poem holds something dark it has inherent beauty. Perhaps she chose its form to soften the hurt of the initial cut; a gentler way of reaching back that permitted ambiguity, of something held slightly at length. I read this poem many times. It was formed from less than a hundred words but there was always more to find within it, especially in the caesuras that seemed like memories rising in quiet, shapeless echoes. I imagined her some forty years earlier, moving from the garden to the house, ascending the stairs to that beautiful bedroom, painted blush pink, with a view to the sparkling harbour.

That reoccurring question: can art be distinguished from the artist? Of course not. Each comes from the other. When a crime like this occurs, people talk about how hard it is to reconcile the person with the action. The outline of a body gives the impression of singularity, containment, of a conflict that can be resolved. But humans are imperfect and notoriously messy. I grieved for her, but I grieved, too, for the loss of the artist, the speed with which his work was relinquished, the paintings ushered back into storage, all fallen silent; the pervasive but ultimately awkward idea that a person could be only good or only bad.

I admired her. She spoke out at a time when it was still uncommon to do so. Predictably she received criticism as well as respect. I went to hear her lecture and shrunk back into the audience, worried that my presence would make her feel uneasy, that my proximity to him might harm her. We later wrote to each other. She was measured, generous. She seemed to me incredibly calm, somehow regal, as though she had found a way to rise above everything that had endeavoured to pull her down. It surprised me that she spoke of him with fondness. But I had empathised with him, too. She remarked that he had struggled with aspects of his identity. I wondered what those aspects were, although I felt I probably knew. I sensed that even as a girl she had been clear-eyed and brilliantly perceptive. But a child is still a child.

Without citations to reinforce perspective, without a fluent argument to underpin it, it strikes me that this short piece of writing is diaristic, brittle. When I first began to write about the artist it came so easily. My sense of wonder was matched in his, the unfurling arc of a romantic narrative that encompassed art and history. It poured out of me, and sometimes brought tears to my eyes. But now the writing is difficult, stilted, unimaginative, coming only in half thoughts. Now when I see a work of his I draw inwards, startled, as if I had seen a ghost. When I first found him, I saw something in his art that was pure and rare. Now I notice other things. The shadows that double back and trail the people in his paintings, the obsessive layering of paint and paper, as though each work was unending, without conclusion.

It may appear selfish, writing of my experience through this. And really, my role was very minor. But this small part seemed as difficult to deal with then as it is to write of now. It was hard to know what to do. In many ways, I felt able to do very little, being obliged to adhere to the museum’s rules which I understood and, in some ways, agreed with. But there was little space within its silence to ask questions, to try to form a dialogue, or to look to art and artists in ways that resisted easy definition. All sorts of failures and accusations are routinely levelled at museums—they are elitist, archaic, bureaucratic. But I didn’t know until that point that they could be so fearful of the art they held and claimed to represent. I am fearful still, writing arcanely and in code. Perhaps I am too timid, but mostly I am conscious of not wanting to inflict more hurt.

There are three remarks that stand out to me, still. The first was made by another artist who said that the very life of his friend had been art. It had all been part of a glittering but sometimes sad and desperate tableaux–as if sadness itself was a kind of defence. The second comment came from another curator, who urged me to see that life must always take precedent over art. The implication being that art, in its artifice, can only ever be a semblance of life, and should be cleaved from the latter when needed–such is the curator’s ethical juggle. The third remark is one I have returned to again and again. A suggestion that the artist had been harmed in his own youth–but this was never something I was able to know.

I have not returned to the house for several years but I can trace it in my mind. Sometimes I draw it, to recommit it to memory. My favourite room stands at the far end of the second floor, where the artist’s mother went to live in old age. When she died, he wrote on her walls in large curling letters—The sparrow has flown. God bless her precious heart. Despite everything, the sadness, the ugliness, the work that can never be as beautiful as the time I first found it, there is something in these words and their lightness that makes me want to remember him, even if I should not.