For as long as I can remember, my father’s contribution to the New Yorker Festival has been to lead ticket holders through a tour of the Frick Collection—the Upper East Side mansion containing industrialist Henry Clay Frick’s collection of old masters. This year, Neal, Oliver, my mother, and I went along. The tickets were supposed to be $250, but he got us comped; he said they couldn’t say no to the request because he had cancer. Oliver followed along, standing in the front row, a smiling, eager student. I mostly stayed in the back, feeling guilt at not having paid and sulking because my father denied my request to record his talk.
Every pill in every rug and every inch of wallpaper in the Frick is just so. The guards are merciless. In the biggest room, several people were taking photos of my dad with their phones, including Alexis, who worked there, so I took out my phone to take a quick photo, too. As I raised it, a guard flew to my side and hissed into my ear, “You can’t take photos here!”
I looked around at the others taking photos, then at the angry face of the guard, so close to mine that I could see her freckles, and I felt confused. People in front of me turned around to see who had just gotten into trouble. They no doubt felt the same schadenfreude I’d experienced minutes earlier when a white-haired woman leaned against a table and a guard acted as though she’d taken out a can of spray paint.
“No, she can,” Alexis said to the guard. “It’s okay,” Alexis said to me, “I just forgot to tell her that you could. Go ahead.” I heard Alexis whisper something to the guard. Probably something like “That’s her dad. He’s dying.”
I no longer wanted to take a picture, but Alexis was looking at me expectantly. I raised my phone, took a quick photo—blurry, I’d see later, useless—and put my phone away. We moved into the Fragonard room. This was where Frick’s lady guests retired after dinner to play cards surrounded by cupids.
I felt myself start to cry. I hated getting in trouble. I pushed down the tears. The last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself again—or to distract my father. If Alexis, or my mother, or Neal, or Oliver saw me, they would ask what was wrong and then I would cry more. I thought about excusing myself to the restroom to splash water on my face, but then I remembered that one of the rules was that a guard had to escort us if we broke off from the group for any reason.
As my father talked about the Fragonards, I felt my face grow hot. I was glad I had on glasses, thinking they might hide my face a bit. I wondered if I should switch them out for my sunglasses or if that would attract more attention. I tried to distract myself by staring hard at the paintings. My father pointed to the cupid stabbing a dove and said he’d asked many experts about the image’s meaning, but there was no consensus. Something about jealousy, probably.
By the time we’d moved on to Rembrandt’s 1658 self-portrait, I was calmer. My father said that the painting made him emotional. In it, Rembrandt was fifty-two. His affair with a maid had been a scandal. A child had died. In his eyes, my father said, “You can see that he knows he is the best painter in the world, but he’s not sure it amounts to a hill of beans.”
We were directed to the next Rembrandt painting, The Polish Rider. A young man sits on the back of a horse in motion. “He’s a killer who hasn’t killed yet,” my father said. “His eyes are hard, but his mouth is soft. By the end of this day, his mouth will be hard like his eyes.” He added that this was a favorite picture of Frank O’Hara’s, who spoke of his admiration for the young rider’s body.
At the Q&A upstairs, strangers asked my father questions. One was who his mentors were. He said Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, “and absolutely Frank O’Hara, in writing and on art.”
On the way out the door, my father asked if Oliver had learned something. Oliver hugged him and said that yes, he especially liked the part about the Polish soldier’s eyes.
On the subway ride home, Oliver told me that he liked that kind of painting more than modern art, which he pretty much never liked.
“That makes me sad!” I said, even though when I was his age, I felt the same way. “It’s so brave of artists to do what they do, to say, Look, I made this and it’s important. They’re trying to tell us something that’s too complicated for a conversation. Same with poets. If they could say it plainer, I think they would. But there’s something deeper that they have to say and maybe they need to say it with an all-white canvas or in little lines that make you feel something different. Or in a song.”
Oliver said he liked Seurat because he respects the skill that takes, but he doesn’t understand why Pollock is revered when anyone could do that.
“Why is it bad if you think you could do that, too?” I said. “Why isn’t it liberating, like punk rock? And if you could so easily make something moving out of paint, why don’t you?”
I heard myself using the same overearnest tone Doris Walker used when speaking to her daughter, Susie, at the end of Miracle on 34th Street: “You must believe in Mr. Kringle and keep right on doing it!”
Going online to find a book to give Oliver about abstract art, I found a pamphlet: What’s with Modern Art? by Frank O’Hara. According to the copyright page, Maureen gave permission to Mike and Dale’s Press in Austin, Texas, in 1999 to print fifteen hundred copies of the chapbook. It’s a collection of O’Hara’s short reviews and a reprint of a one-page item in Ingenue magazine from December 1964 called “Teens Quiz a Critic: ‘What’s with Modern Art?’”
In the article, O’Hara, in his role as assistant curator at MoMA, answers teenagers’ questions. The first is about what it means when an artist splashes paint on a canvas. He replies that if a person devotes effort to something like that it means that he’s serious and he’s trying to communicate something. He also says that “as at the beach, a splash can be a very beautiful thing.”