The morning rush-hour was thankfully over. Travelling on the crowded London underground can be confusing, especially when you’re late. Rushing out of the train, I headed for the exit, then grabbed the railing while mounting the stairs two at a time. Once outside, I turned left to the park at the end of the street. There, the flags for the Bonnard show and the Tate Gallery were visible. Marvin was sitting on a park bench in a trench coat holding a tin can of 7UP looking at me with an expression of, where you been?
I met Marvin in the early 70s and it didn’t take long to find out he was a Bonnard fanatic. He signed all his letters to me, Marvin Bonnard or Pierre Friedman and now his e-mails, Bonnard - Le Cannet. He had just arrived from New Jersey. I was in Amsterdam when I got his call to meet here. I’m a Marvin Friedman fan.
People began to move toward the entrance. Marv stood, took the tickets for the show from the breast pocket of his coat, ‘Let’s go to Heaven,’ he said. We lined up with the rest.
‘I went to Le Cannet in the 70s,’ just before I met you.’ He told me. ‘There was nobody living in Bonnard’s house when I was there but somebody was looking after it. The windows were barred but I could look inside. I saw a kitten under a table drinking milk from a saucer. It was a tiny room. There were still dabs of oil paint on the wall where he worked. I couldn’t help wondering how he laboured in this confined space.’ This comment explained, in a way, Bonnard’s strange perspective; almost flat, giving the impression of being closer to the painting than you are. He couldn’t walk back to study his work.
‘Nobody knew Bonnard when I started,’ Marvin said. ‘In high school, I was imitating Norman Rockwell. At art school I thought he was the greatest artist that ever lived. The teachers put paintings on the wall by faculty and illustrators. They didn’t put up fine art. We worked at lettering, learned how to make a mechanical, and how to make gesso. Bullshit, go buy a jar of gesso. They had to fill up their eight hours with something.’ He was talking like he was reliving his art life the same way a drowning person recalls everything (so they say) when he is about to go under.
‘Somewhere along the line teachers hung paintings by Ben Eisenstadt,’ he continued. ‘The paint dripped. The paint didn’t stay in the lines. The water was dark. Black lines in the water. Everybody laughed at them. “Ho ho, Jesus, terrible paintings,” one student said. “What kind of shit is this?” snickered another. The artist had put a cloud up there and the paint dripped all the way down to here,’ he gestured. ‘I looked. I looked and I looked. Then one day, BOOM! That’s it. It was the first time I really got into painting. He changed my life and he was imitating Monet.’
I felt a twinge of guilt run up my spine. I was guilty of imitating Marvin…too many times. Drawing and painting is no different than writing. Adopting, as another artist friend calls it, is part of the learning process. Eventually you get back to who you really are. If they are good, some of the influence rubs off and crepes into your work. Besides, what also intrigued me was life-long hero worship. Finally, I asked him the question that I had thought about while travelling to London. ‘How do you define a hero?’
‘You create an attachment to everything he does,’ he said without hesitation. ‘No matter what you do, you can never reach him. A hero enhances your life. When I began freelancing, I met Tony Lasale, art director of Cosmopolitan magazine, who didn’t have money for illustration. He went to galleries at lunch hour, borrowed transparencies of paintings, maybe gave them a hundred dollars for the use and filled the magazine with paintings. He showed me this Bonnard. I didn’t know the artist. The picture showed a woman in a bathroom sculpted by light. That was the first one I saw and I just died. I can’t explain it.’
We were finally in the building and there they were; enormous high-ceiling rooms full of Bonnards. Marvin looked a bit pale as he walked silently from picture to picture. When I was studying one painting, he disappeared. I found him later in another room full of large paintings of Martha, Bonnard’s wife and only model, in the bathtub. Martha, I had read, was a clean freak and spent much of her time there. I suspect one of the paintings Marvin saw in that room was the very first one he had seen many years ago in the art director’s office in New York. He stood holding his hand over his mouth studying a bath scene. When he saw me he took his hand away, ‘Jesus Christ man,’ he said quickly, ‘I just died and went to Heaven. I got to sit down.’
Late in the afternoon, we stopped at a London tea-room for something to eat. ‘A teacher of mine, Albert Gold, was one of several artists elected by the government to cover World War Two in Europe.’ Marv picked up the story of his art life where he had left it before the show. ‘His stuff was always in LIFE magazine. He had the rank of Sergeant or Corporal, I don’t know. Won the Prix-de-Rome. Very big artist. At the end of the war he borrowed a jeep from the U.S. Army that would only go backwards. He drove from Nice to Cannes in reverse, up into the hills to Le Cannet where he knocked on the artist’s door. Bonnard was very old and shaky but he invited Gold in, gave him a cup of tea and talked to him for a few minutes. I don’t know why he didn’t visit Matisse who was living close by. Al’s work doesn’t look like Bonnard’s. He doesn’t think like him.’
‘At parties, I’d ask him to tell me about when he met Bonnard. “Ooh no,” he’d say, “I told you that story over and over.” So, I’d love to have met Jack Benny. But Al had met Bonnard. It was like shaking hands with someone who shook the hand of…he had met Bonnard.’
‘Here is a little thought,’ he continued calmly. His big fingers held a tiny scone as he leaned over the table. ‘If God said to you, “I’ll give you a choice. I’ll make you poor for the rest of your life but when you die you will be famous all over the world, or, I’ll give you a lot of money now and nobody will ever hear from you again, goodbye,” what would you do?’ He put the scone in his mouth, ‘Bonnard didn’t have a choice,’ he mumbled.
That was a question I may be able to answer in a week, or better, a month. As I was ordering my brain to respond, he said, ‘An artist friend took the money. It shocked me because he is a true artist. He lives like a true artist. Takes him forever to make a painting. Never has money. Takes him months of begging to get his cheques from galleries. They take half. It doesn’t offend him which I think is great. It offends me. Having to beg offends me.’
‘The French painter never knew fame like it is today. He had no idea that half a century later he would be in the Tate Museum and that I would travel from West Trenton to see his original pictures. He would faint if he knew what his paintings are now worth. All he wanted to do was look at his garden, go to his canvas and dab on a few more bursts of colour, or walk to the bathroom and watch Martha. Even in old age, he painted her as a young woman. He didn’t need a big loft or Matisse’s great plants and stuff Matisse lived with.’
We finished the little sandwiches, paid and left. I could see Marvin was feeling jet-lag, which for him would be kicking in about now and I suspected he wanted to digest the exhibition. Walking across the lobby of his hotel to the elevators, he said, ‘I don’t know if Bonnard would make it today. Galleries hang paintings with all that shiny motorcycle-beautiful-jaguar detail. I don’t know if he’d make it today. I don’t know. I wish…’ I faintly heard his last words as the door closed.
It was the middle of March. The evening was already dark and it began to rain as I walked from the hotel. People passed on their way home holding umbrellas, attaché cases, groceries and probably no thoughts of the Tate exhibition or the French artist. I imagined them arriving home anxious to rip off their ties, suits or tight dresses before finally stretching out on the couch in time for East Enders.
A cold breeze shook drops of water on my head from the tree branches above as I walked past the Flying Horse.
I paused, turned around, walked back, entered and ordered a beer. Sitting at a small round table watching bored bartenders getting ready for the evening, I took a drink and opened my sketchbook. Studying the point of my pencil, a tiny voice in the far recesses of my mind told me that something major went on at the exhibition today.
I was looking at paintings; Marvin was connected to Bonnard’s unfulfilled longing for perfection. I looked and looked and looked and no BOOM hit me. But I do know how it feels to have a good day or even a memorable moment. I stopped drawing, added a couple colour notes and put my sketchbook away. I emptied the glass and as I watched the bartender pull a beer, I suddenly remembered Marvin’s last words when the elevator door closed, ‘…I wish I was him.
