Seek My Face by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page A

drawing plaster casts at Cooper,the smell of real paint was heavenly. Like wind on your face when you ice-skate.”
    “What was Hochmann like?”
    “Oh, Kathryn, you’ll think I’m so silly to keep saying this, but he was handsome. Every man I ran up against in those days seemed to me handsome. Even though Hochmann was over sixty by then, he was tall and broad, with hair left long like a musician’s and tremendous big features—a wonderfully sensual, imperious mouth—and still very Germanic, very solemn, very hard to understand. Both his English, and what he was saying with it. He hadn’t come here until he was fifty, and then to the West Coast. He was a missionary, bringing the gospel of modernism to an art scene that, of course, was very much American Wave—Benton’s farmhands in the style of El Greco, Grant Wood and Rockwell Kent and that mock-epic stylization. Mural style for the Common Man. Hooray for democracy. Some of it, John Steuart Curry, the Soyer brothers, doesn’t look so terrible now, it’s become art history, but at the time we
despised
it. The thing about Hochmann was, a lot of people were vaguely talking about abstraction as the only ethical way to paint, but he offered a concrete prescription. He said astonishing things—astonishing to me, at least. He said when you put a single line on a piece of paper there is no telling what its direction is. But if you put a shorter line under it, the longer line
moves
, and the shorter one goes in the opposite direction. He said the piece of paper had now become a universe, in motion. He said the edges of paper became lines, too. And—this must have been Hegel, or Kant, thesis and antithesis and whatever—that when there was a third thing, as in music when two notes combine to make a third sound, this third thing was spiritual, non-physical, surreal. This was magic, he felt. The two linesmoving in different directions had tension between them, and that made them a living thing, what he called ‘a living unit.’ With color it got more complicated. Color, he said, made us feel certain ways—buoyant, depressed. Some colors receded, others came forward. He kept talking about ‘push and pull.’
Poo-oosh und pool
.”
    Hochmann’s ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer, the handsome big face vulnerably lit by his daily hope of communicating to the students the spiritual depth of paint, the students in their dirty smocks, salmon or oatmeal in color, white socks and penny loafers and saddle shoes peeking out below, the boys leaning against the smirched hallway walls smoking, the girls in stiff ’forties imitations of Hollywood hair as it was then, pageboys, bangs, stiff waves done with those long-nosed curling irons, you plugged them in and they opened like birds’ beaks, all those listening young heads buzzing with hopes, with frayed connections to the past and future, the streets outside brown and gray and jostling in her mind’s eye like village rows in a Chagall or a Kirchner, even the spires in distant midtown—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State—caught up in the soot, the toxic war clouds, while Hochmann strove to impart his saving message: “
Begrenzung
. What do you say in English? Limitation. The canvas is a limitation. Without consciousness of limitation there can be no expression of the Infinite.
Unendlichkeit. Ewigkeit
. Beethoven creates Eternity in the physical limitation of the symphony. Any limitation can be subdivided infinitely. This involves the problem of time and relativity. A single star seen alone in space tells us nothing about space. Space must be vital and active. The space on the canvas must have a life of the spirit, the life of a creative mind. Pictorial space exists two-dimensionally,only. When the two-dimensionality of a picture is violated, it falls, how do you say, into parts—it creates an effect of naturalistic space, a special case, a portion of three-dimensionality, and