Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [138]
Irina said, “I promised you the show would be beautiful.” In Russian, the word for “beautiful” has the same root as the word for “red.” “What do you think?”
“I love it.”
“You said the right thing.”
The painting reflected Irina. She radiated.
“Congratulations.” Max arrived with glasses of champagne. “This is a coup.”
“Where did it come from?” Arkady asked. He couldn’t imagine the Russian State Museum lending one of its most valuable possessions to a private gallery.
“Patience,” said Max. “The question is, what will it bring?”
Irina said, “It’s priceless.”
“Only in rubles,” Max said. “The people here have Deutsche marks, yen and dollars.”
Thirty minutes after the doors were opened, security guards herded everyone into the theater section, where the video artist Arkady remembered from Tommy’s party was waiting beside a VCR and a parabolic rear-projection screen. There weren’t enough chairs, so people sat on the floor and crowded the walls. From the back Arkady overheard some of their comments. They were devotees and collectors, far more knowledgeable than he, but one thing even he knew: there was not supposed to be any “Red Square” by Malevich outside Russia.
Irina and Margarita Benz went to the front of the theater while Max joined Arkady. Only when the room was absolutely still did the gallery owner speak. She had a hoarse voice with a Russian accent, and though Arkady’s German wasn’t good enough to catch every word, he understood that she was placing Malevich at the level of Cézanne and Picasso as a founder of modern art, perhaps a little higher as the most relevant and challenging artist, the genius of his age. As Arkady recalled, Malevich’s problem had been that there was another genius residing at the Kremlin, and that genius, Stalin, had decreed that Soviet writers and artists should be “engineers of the human soul,” which in the case of painters meant producing realistic pictures of the proletariat building dams and collective farmers reaping wheat, not mysterious red squares.
Margarita Benz introduced Irina as the author of the catalog, and as she stepped forward Arkady saw her looking over the seated rows at him and Max. Even in his new pullover he was aware that he looked more like an uninvited guest than a patron of the arts, while Max was the opposite, practically a host. Or were he and Max bookends, meant to be a pair?
The lights went out. On the screen was “Red Square,” four times its actual size.
Irina spoke in Russian and German. Russian for him, Arkady knew; German for everyone else. “Catalogs will be available at the door and they will go into much greater detail than anything I say now. It’s important, however, that you have a visual understanding of the study this painting has undergone. There are some details you can see on a screen that you wouldn’t be able to find if we allowed you to pick up the painting and examine it by hand.”
It was both comforting and odd to hear Irina’s voice in the dark. It was like hearing her on the radio.
The red square was replaced on the screen by a black-and-white photo of a dark man with serious brows, fedora and topcoat standing before an intact Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the one that was now a war memorial on the Ku’damm.
Irina said, “In 1927 Kazimir Malevich visited Berlin for a retrospective exhibit of his paintings. He had already fallen into disfavor in Moscow. Berlin at that time had two hundred thousand Russian émigrés. Munich had Kandinsky. Paris had Chagall, the poet Tsetaeva and the Ballet Russe. Malevich was considering his own escape. The Berlin show contained seventy Malevich paintings. He also brought with him an undetermined number of other works—in other words, half of his entire life’s output. However, when he was summoned back to Moscow in June, he returned. His wife and small daughter were still in Russia. Also, the Communist party’s Central Committee’s agitation and propaganda section was putting artists under more pressure and Malevich’s students appealed to him to protect them. When he boarded the train for Moscow,