Seek My Face by John Updike Read Free Book Online

through Ruk that I first met Korgi, and Onno de Genoog.”
    “And what were they like?”
    These vanished dead men, why does Kathryn’s voice grow warmer, evasively slack, as if contemplating stealingthem for herself? “Alike, really. They were both immigrants, and had that Continental élan; they assumed the world was made for human pleasure, a very snobbish and barbaric view, of course, but it made them attractive; it gave them swagger and freed them up to paint in those lovely light colors they used. They were the same age, oddly, though you think of Korgi as a generation older. He got there first. I mean, there had been Kandinsky and Malevich and Mondrian, of course, doing abstraction, but they were like flares at sea, lonely signals, religious in a crazy way no one could be seriously expected to imitate—I mean,
think
of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, what we are being asked to swallow! It all goes back to Kandinsky—his essays, and Der Blaue Reiter, spiritualism rescuing us from materialism and the dreadful perspective-mad Renaissance and so on, as I’m sure you know better than I, since you’ve just been studying everything. But all it brought Kandinsky to was a lot of ugly, jumpy geometry, whereas the place that Korgi got to turned out to be an island, a large island full of these fantasic, edible flowers. I mean, everybody could eat them, and grow and grow. After Korgi committed suicide—when was that? ’48, just when his influence was triumphing, really—Onno would talk about the first time he visited Korgi’s studio, in Union Square, sometime in the ’thirties. He said the atmosphere was so saturated with beauty it made him dizzy. ‘Dissy,’ he pronounced it. It was a revelation he never got over. You can see it in the colors both men used—those coral pinks, those baby blues, the darting strokes between oval forms like amoebas or lily pads, floating across the canvas like, what?, those things in the vision when you look at a blank wall, in the vitreous humor—though in Korgi of course it all becomes transparent, whereas Onno tried to thicken everything, a ferociousthicket of strokes, but the colors are still playful, childlike even. Korgi, like Ruk, was strikingly tall, almost freakish, and his English could be witty. He called the Regionalist School ‘poor painting for poor people.’ ”
    Hope laughs, remembering the velvety accent, the cape and broad-brimmed hat, the haughty indignation, the searching light in the Armenian’s mournful long-lashed eyes as he respectfully searched Hope’s face for his opportunities there. He was, through maintaining a parasitic connection with the Art Students League, a considerable harvester in the ripe fields of the art-struck. He would say to a girl, “Come to my studio, be my
vooman
.” But Hope would laugh. She was never tempted. He was simply Ruk again, though with a naïve, unnegotiable genius that Ruk lacked, and she sensed in him reserves of nihilism that Ruk’s butterfly nature did not threaten her with. She was too young, she thought, to take on a troubled man, though in a few years she would take on Zack.
    “And it was Ruk,” she informs Kathryn, “who put me on to Hermann Hochmann and his little school, where the real action was. I don’t think we said ‘where the action was’ then. Or ‘cutting edge.’ What did we say? ‘Most advanced,’ maybe. There was this military notion of advance. Hochmann had set up shop in a single big third-story room on West Ninth Street. The day I walked in, the whole school, about twenty at their easels, was gathered around this most odd still life—some broken pottery, a crumpled Kleenex, a playing card, and a ball of string from the hardware store, with the paper band still on it, and the whole thing backed by cellophane raked by a side light so that it all was fragmented reflections and shadows. It was almost impossible to look at, let alone paint. Yet, everybody was painting away, and after a year of