New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [388]
“That’s Rockefeller Center,” he said to his son. “They kept on building it right through the Depression because Rockefeller had money and guts. Isn’t it fine?”
“Yes,” said Gorham.
“A New Yorker can never be beat, Gorham, because he gets right back up again. Remember that.”
“Okay, Dad,” said the little boy.
The cab took them round, up Sixth and back through Central Park. It was really very pleasant. But as they came back to where they’d started, Charlie couldn’t help reflecting upon one, inescapable truth. They’d just taken a horse-drawn hansom, like tourists. Tonight he’d take Gorham to a show, somewhat like a tourist. And tomorrow he’d have to take him back to Staten Island.
And then his son spoke.
“Dad.”
“Yes, Gorham.”
“When I grow up, I’m going to live here.”
“Well, I hope you will.”
The little boy frowned, and looked up at his father solemnly, as if he had not quite been understood.
“No, Dad,” he said quietly, “it’s what I’m going to do.”
Charlie arrived at the gallery quite early, but Sarah Adler was already there.
The Betty Parsons Gallery was on Fifty-fifth Street. It had only opened in 1946, but it was already famous. Partly, no doubt, it was Betty’s character. Born into old money, she’d followed the prescribed path, married young and respectably. But then she’d rebelled. She’d gone to Paris, and set up house with another woman. In the thirties she’d lived in Hollywood, and been a friend of Greta Garbo. Finally, an artist herself, she’d set up her gallery in New York.
And in the 1950s, if you were interested in modern art, New York was the place to be.
There had been American schools of art before: the Hudson River School in the nineteenth century, with its magnificent landscapes of the Hudson Valley, Niagara and the West; the American Impressionists, who’d often gathered in France, around Monet’s place in Giverny, before returning home. But good though they were, you couldn’t say they’d invented any new kind of painting. And indeed, the huge movements of modern abstract art, from cubism onward, had all been European.
Until now. Suddenly, a crowd of artists with huge, bold abstract work, unlike anything seen before, had burst upon the New York scene. Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Barnett Newman, Motherwell, de Kooning, Rothko—“the Irascibles,” people often called them. The name of their school: Abstract Expressionism.
Modern America had an art that was all its own. And at the center of it all was a small, indefatigable lady, born into the world of New York private schools, and summers in Newport, but who preferred the company of the most daring artists of her time: Betty Parsons. And her gallery, of course.
It was a group show. Motherwell was there, and Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock too. Charlie brought Sarah over to meet Pollock. Then he and Sarah looked at the work.
The show was magnificent. One Pollock they particularly liked—a dense riot of browns, whites and grays. “It looks like he rode around the canvas on a bicycle,” Sarah whispered.
“Perhaps he did,” said Charlie, with a grin. Yet it seemed to him that, as usual, in that apparently random, swirling mass of abstract color, you could find subliminal repetitions and complex rhythms, which gave the work amazing power. “Some people think he’s a fraud,” he said, “but I think he’s a genius.”
There was a fine Motherwell, one of his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, with great black glyphs and vertical bars on a white canvas. “It feels as if it’s resonating,” Sarah said. “Like an oriental mantra. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes,” said Charlie, “it does.” It was funny, he thought, it hardly mattered whether someone was older than you or half your age, when there was a real meeting of minds. He smiled to himself. Money and power were supposed to be the biggest aphrodisiacs, but shared imagination was just as strong, it seemed to him, and lasted longer.
They both saw people they knew, and drifted apart to talk to them. He