The Art of Revision

Years ago, when I fell in love with a friend, I fell in love, too, with the art he loved. It was an unrequited affection, which also led to the end of our friendship. Amid the maelstrom of my desire, the plotting and scheming I would engage in hoping to win him over, I came to admire one of his favorite paintings, J.M.W. Turner’s The Whalers (1845).

Whenever we would stare at it together in gallery 808 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he would remark on how the canvas appeared to be “backlit,” which, at the time, I thought was an original characterization of Turner's paintings, but, likely, is not. Yet, whenever we were in the company of other friends looking at other Turners, such as those at the Frick Collection, he would utter that same remark for us to hear.

How I would watch, beatifically, at he stared at the Turner canvas—and now, having accidentally seen him again after several years of having had no contact, what I regarded as reverence he was showing for the work was, perhaps, instead posturing. Everyone, though, wants to be recognized for being an authority, for being able to issue original responses to something esoteric.

So obsessed was I with what I regarded as his painterly obsession, as well as my ongoing fruitless efforts to win his affection, that I wrote much about him and various artworks he admired (including publishing an essay for Fine Art Connoisseur magazine about this very Turner painting). My written responses about the art he liked were as much works meant to be published and, in the case of a one-act play and a short monologue, performed, as they were “letters”, of sorts, to him. I failed to win my inamorato (to use an unconventional masculine form of that Italian noun, which means beloved). I have a penchant for the written ekphrastic (“art from art”) response. And when I write about someone, it keeps them present for me.

Now, I see that Turner painting as echoing who he was as a person and friend. Where I once looked at the diaphanous, misty, imprecise sea scene of whalers seeking prey as being representative of the mystery of my former friend, his complexity, I see it today as murky and chaotic, unkempt and even hostile. It lacks discernible detail and nuance. Fact is, I have never loved Turner paintings, precisely because his canvases often become lost in a miasma of abstraction rather than staying to a clearly discernible narrative. His colors, too, are never Technicolor-beautiful, rather muddy and jaundiced.

I no longer wish to gaze at The Whalers canvas as I once did. In those first weeks after our friendship had ended, for me to see the painting was to wallow in some of the desire I still felt for him. To see the work was a bittersweet reminder of him and the power of the longing that had once coursed through me—but, as a result, had supplied me, too, with an unfinished story to which I could return in my imagination, each time revising the dialogue and plot for a happier ending.

It was after running into him weeks ago, after having had no contact for seven years, that I realized I no longer have any fondness for the Turner work and that I needn’t pay that occasional, obligatory visit to the gallery to see it. That angry whale that has killed its harpoon-wielding hunters with a thrashing of its head and fin might be a metaphorical allusion to him. My friend killed our friendship once he discerned my feelings for him—though one could argue that I did so by falling for him and, thus, driving him away. I, too, sent a harpoon into our friendship and he responded by casting me into the sea. Not to overextend this metaphor, but I swam to safety, reached the boat, and sailed home.

As for that recent sighting of him, I was in his venerable arts-related, members-only club for a meeting with an editor and a painter about whom I was assigned to write a profile. As I sat in the club, the ticking of clocks and tinkle of silverware against china as background noise, I suddenly recalled that he was a member. When the meeting concluded and I descended the grand staircase to retrieve my coat, I felt a sudden unease with each step, fearing that I might suddenly run into him. But, I reasoned, it being midday, midweek, that seemed unlikely.

And, yet, as if having willed him into being by thinking of him, the moment I stepped into the club's cloakroom, there he was, stuffing a backpack and scarf into a cubby hole. He was dressed in his typical blue blazer and looked much the same as he always had, actually, younger and more dashing. As I approached him, I called out his name, but he barely glanced up, seemingly distracted by the task of putting away his things.

“It’s David,” I told him, my hand outstretched. He gave it a quick once up, once down weak shake, then said, absent any enthusiasm, “Oh, hi, I’m horribly late for a meeting.”

And off he went.

As he walked away, I thought he might have had the wherewithal to issue a wave over a shoulder or call out a vague apology at having to dash off. He did not. He retreated into the echoing marble hallways as my coat hangers sounded out their atonal chimes.

On my walk home across Midtown, I felt a mild self-shame at having been ignored, shunned even. When we were still friends, I used to joke with him and other friends about his extreme version of cool Waspdom, as I referred to his lineage—a man with a surname referencing an old American family. He was always known for his reserve and Yankee frugality, but I found it somewhat charming then, always presenting a challenge to break through his veneer. One evening, as he was making a pasta dinner for us at his apartment, he poured the uncooked shells into two soup bowls, leaving the remaining eighth-of-a-pound, or so, in the box rather than adding it to the boiling water. And when he would bring wine to my house when I was making dinner, he carried in bottles that he had already opened and that swished around with just enough contents to (maybe) fill a single glass. Such were his benign eccentricities.

A much older artist friend of mine, a woman at my club, The National Arts Club, knew of my unrequited feelings for him, even if I had never stated that to her. When I took him to the club one evening, I introduced him to her and we three sat and talked for one drink. Days later, when I ran into her, an elegant, talented Jewish woman who speaks her mind, she came up to me, took my elbow and said, “Sweetheart, that friend of yours, he’s not for you.”

I was surprised she knew of my feelings for him, but women, truly, do discern such things quicker than men.

His not reciprocating my feelings does not make him a bad person. I cannot, and do not, blame him for that. I often invoke familiar W. H. Auden lines: If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me.

It is harder to be the adored one. The famous poet’s sentiment seems also to express the idea that those possessing an ability to love, even if it goes unrequited, possess the more valuable of traits. Like all paintings, no matter how realistic or abstract, a person, too, is open to interpretation.

I rarely tire of a painting I like, whether it's in a museum gallery or on a wall in my living room, but I no longer have to pretend that I like the Turner. Yes, it's a dynamic period scene of whalers amid rough seas, but, frankly, one that became meaningful to me only after I had read descriptions of what it really depicts. Without its narrative conveyed on the wall plaque, the painting presents itself as a cataracted view of the sea with something tumultuous happening in the background.

Someone he and I knew in common mentioned to me not long ago that the former friend had referred to me once as a “stalker”—an inaccurate, and offensive, description, especially since I had made no contact with him for those several years, until that coatroom encounter. It was an unfortunate remark to have heard, and I have remained bothered by it—though I understand now what it might mean. Years ago, I did embark on a too-concerted effort to write about some of the art he had cited and to know some of the art world friends he had. I published and had pieces performed. I did that for contradictory reasons, some noble, others selfish. I wanted to impress him with my output, yet outdo him, win his affections by writing about his passions, yet prove that I was the real writer on art. Like the stalker whale hunters, he had launched a harpoon from afar these years later and it struck a glancing blow.

When we were still friends and would go to a museum, he would choose to go first into the modern and contemporary wings, always my last choice. And I would look at the planks of plywood by John McCracken leaning against a wall or cars crushed into cubes by John Chamberlain and pretend to be equally engaged, listening intently as he opined on the works.

The other day, after spending time attending the exhaustive (and exhausting) Raphael show at the Met, I wandered into the galleries of 19th-century European paintings and looked at The Whalers. It still does not appear backlit. It does, however, still tell a good story.

Yet, there are paintings at the Met with more affecting tales to tell than that of the Turner. I often wander into the American Wing to look at the Henry Ossawa Tanner masterpiece of a young boy and grandfather saying grace at a kitchen table over a surprisingly modest meal. In the Asian galleries I like to read the 18 poems and scenes depicted on an ancient Chinese scroll that recount the kidnapping, and return home, of a maiden. I can gaze for a long time at Jean Alaux’s painting of a contemplative young man strumming his guitar in a room in Rome in 1817. And positioned within site of that Turner work is Johan Christian Dahl’s scene of people gathered at the Copenhagen waterfront by moonlight where they look to the tranquil harbor and beyond to the open sea where there is no indication of tumult.