Harry and his friends imagine a future in which their paintings speak to their countrymen as loud as a game of football. They see a time when people will cast aside their daily struggle to hustle along to a gallery and taste triumph and defeat in dramas laid out on canvas. They see these powerful canvases sold for fabulous sums. This quixotic twaddle sustains them through their days reeking of turpentine and paint. Painting matters, they assure each other. The coming art will be powerful enough to please and enlighten great hordes of Australians. They need to believe this, or why become artists?
And sitting in the National Gallery of Victoria before the Weeping Woman, Harry finds it easy to believe. Looking at the richness of her pain, and knowing the enormous sum the Victorian government has paid for her, the importance of art is evident. He sits there smiling at her, infected with puppy love for this older woman.
He is still smiling dopily when a bus-load of pear-shaped old people smelling of camphor and wearing hand-knitted cardigans shuffles in front of him and scrums down before her to hoot disapproval, all trying to outdo each other in their contempt.
‘Oh, a shameful waste of public money.’
‘I got grandkids knockin’ these out.’
‘I got a Labrador paints in this oeuvre – with his tail.’
‘Looks like a painting of a woman who worked all day so she could give half her pay to the taxman so he could spend it on a painting of a woman who worked all day so she could give half her pay to the taxman.’
‘Cheesed off.’
‘Miserable.’
‘Both eyes on one side of her nose.’
‘Elementary mistake.’
‘And both eyes different. I can’t stand an artist who can’t paint two same things the same. I say go back and have art lessons.’
The Weeping Woman is the most expensive painting ever purchased by the state of Victoria and there is great public debate about the money spent on her. If you are on art’s side, you are her champion. If you despise art and lament the taxpayer’s burden, she is Medusa. A gallery guard sits close by to protect her from those who would strike her down as a false prophet.
These old people have endured a three-hour bus trip to deride her openly. It has become a modern trek. War veterans and widows in middle Victoria can take a bus north to New South Wales to play the poker machines for the weekend, or south to insult the Weeping Woman. Either is a good, fun option. Those that travel south surround her and talk up Turner and the Reformation and Rembrandt, and say the pain evident on her face looks vaguely haemorrhoidal and is not to be compared with the suffering of the poor taxpayer struggling to make ends meet. She possibly brings her detractors more pleasure than she brings her worshippers, as is modern art’s fate.
Harry is sitting on the bench despising the ruck of unbelievers that stand between him and the painting when a woman wearing a green suede coat sits down next to him. She has vivid silver streaks in her hair and is beautiful. Eyes so bright as to be almost hostile. He begins to watch her out of the corner of his eye. The contempt grows on her face as she listens to the crowd attacking the Weeping Woman. Only a woman confident in her beauty, in her ability to defy age, would let her hair remain so flamboyantly striped with silver. A satchel of henna would annihilate those stripes. But they work to her favour, contrasting with her bright eyes and smooth skin, accentuating her loveliness. The creature of myth, Harry thinks, the woman whose beauty heightens with the years. Catherine Deneuve, Lauren Bacall.
She scowls at the unbelievers, and Harry is so pleased to have found someone else who clearly despises these old farts that he leans towards her and whispers, ‘Arseholes.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees in a vaguely European accent. ‘I like to smack their heads.’
‘Me too.’ Harry says.
‘I feel sorry for her.’
Harry inclines his head. ‘You come here a lot?’
‘Galleries and paintings …’ She looks around, smiling, letting Harry know her love of galleries and paintings. ‘You paint?’ she asks.
He feels a rush of pride, as he always does when someone accepts him as an artist. Holding up his hands, spattered with dried paint, he rotates them. ‘I should wash better.’
‘Hands and boots. Always with artists,’ she says. His Blundstones have paint drippings across them. To her it looks more like ostentation than neglect: the kid has marked himself as an artist.
‘I’m here at the gallery. At the School of Art downstairs.’
‘You study here in this gallery?’ She turns to face him, look at him. ‘You must be very good, I think.’
‘Oh, you know. No. I mean … I don’t know. I got in here.’
‘And everyone wants to get in here. So. You are that good, at least. Even if you are no better.’ She smiles. ‘You admit to being that good?’
‘Yeah, okay,’ he nods. ‘You know a lot of artists?’ he asks. ‘You said artists always had paint on their hands and boots.’
‘I have. I am a consultant. I buy art for people.’
Harry feels a vast inner disturbance. ‘You do? But, like, just famous artists, I suppose? Investments.’
‘Mostly well known. But sometimes not. Best of all is to buy the work of an anonymous artist and sell it five years later when he is a freshly dead superstar.’
In his stomach Harry feels a rush of excitement. He turns to face her, straddling the bench seat as he does, leaning forwards. ‘You won’t believe this. This is either fate or something else. I’m having my first exhibition this Friday. At the Colditz Gallery in the city.’ He waits for her to show surprise at her good luck, for her eyes to widen, her mouth to gape. But she merely smiles politely.
‘Why don’t you come? I’m inviting you. Please.’
‘Can you guarantee to be a dead superstar in five years?’
Harry holds up his open hand, showing his palm, taking an oath. ‘I’ll cut it down to two and a half.’ He puts his hands together before him to beg. She laughs silently at his supplication. ‘Kid …’
He watches the woman hungrily, waiting to see what she will say.
She pouts sceptically. He thinks how a woman’s pout is as attractive as her smile. She has the best eyes he’s ever seen on anyone.
‘I am not often buying at first exhibitions.’
‘Just come along. Jesus. I am an anonymous guy. I got that part covered.’
‘Many have that part covered.’
‘Tell you what, here’s a deal: if you come to my exhibition I’ll escort you in here on a midnight tour. Just us. None of these dumb arseholes polluting the vibe.’ He sweeps a hand at the old people.
‘You can?’ She looks around doubtfully.
‘Yeah, I can. It’s beautiful in here at night, without the dirt-bags. Like being a president or a royal. You know they opened up the Louvre at night once for Charles and Di? Only them in the whole damn wonderland.’