“Correct!” Gwenny turned back to the paper. “And here’s another one!” She drew a circle. “And here’s another!” She drew a triangle. “And another!” The outline this time, drawn with a sureness that shamed Nagy, was of a child: we laughed. “And another!” This one was of such intricate complexity, with so many inroads and curlicues, peaks, dells, and harbors, it made both child and amoeba look circle-simple. “And another!” Another circle, but with two points near the top. Adding a few whisker strokes and some eye dots, Gwenny turned it into a lopsided cat’s face. We laughed again. “Shapes. Lots of different shapes. All there in my picture.” She stepped back from the paper tacked to the painted wallboard, galaxies of tack holes across its gray enamel. “So — what is one thing that goes into a picture?”
We smiled, but we were still — at least I was — confused.
“After all this,” Gwenny said, “you must have figured it out. I’ve told you ten times, now.”
So, very tentatively, someone said: “Shapes…”
“Absolutely!” She closed her eyes and breathed in as though she were scenting a fire — that suddenly turned to roses. She opened her eyes again. “It’s very hard to make a picture that doesn’t have any shapes in it at all. So, let’s all say it together. What is one of the things that makes a picture?”
This time, we cried out, emboldened by unison: “Shapes!”
“Well, then, you’re not such a bunch of little wooden noggins! I was beginning to wonder.” It wasn’t like a Nagy lesson at all. We were grinning now. “At least one of the things that makes up a picture is… shape.” She turned back to thumbtack up another yard-wide piece of drawing paper over the first. “But what else goes into a picture?”
We were silenced again. I couldn’t think of anything else of the same basic import.
Suddenly Gwenny raised her crayon and put a diagonal slash across the off-white sheet. “What’s that?”
Wanting to redeem my previous failure, I raised my hand.
“Yes…?”
“That divides the picture up into two shapes,” I said with analytic certainty.
“Oh, I can tell,” she said. “You’re going to be a scientist. But you’re in an art class now.” She looked at me sternly. “You see, what I want to know is: what is it that does the dividing?” And she was looking around for another hand.
I’d failed again.
But nobody else answered either.
“Well,” she said, making another slash across the paper, “what’s that?” She made still another — only this one was a wavery curve. “And that.” It was kind of a squiggle. “And that.” The next was a longer, softer curve.
Someone had apparently gotten the idea and called out: “Lines!”
Gwenny loped across the room, grabbed the very startled boy by both cheeks. (For an instant I thought she was about to strike him for some unimaginable infraction!) She kissed his forehead loudly. “Yes, my little strawberry-custard confection! Lines!” She stepped back to clasp her hands again. “That’s exactly what they are!” For a moment, the rest of us were as startled as he. Then, once more, we laughed. But Gwenny had our attention, and as soon as she spoke again we fell into (anxious) quiet. “So, we have two things now that go to make up a picture: shapes and lines. But there must be something else.” She furrowed her face, began to pull at her chin. Walking slowly by the low counter where the gallon cans of watercolors stood on their ledge, circled with stalactites of lazuli and alizarin, she gazed into them. “I wonder… what… it… could… be?”
The stripped-down quality of her esthetic had registered. (I had my own suspicion as to the answer, but I’d failed twice and wasn’t going to be caught out a third time.) Someone called out: “Paint!”
“Paint?” Gwenny pondered the paint pots. “But what do we put the paint on a picture for? What do we use the paint to achieve?”
Why I blurted it through my initial hesitations I don’t know: “Color…!”
Gwenny looked up at me, scarlet-nailed hand splayed across her mouth in glaring astonishment. Then the hand swung out toward me, over the class’s heads, and the gesture became a grandly blown kiss, as flamboyant as any by fat, black Rose Murphy. “Color…! Yes, color! I kiss you too, my little mocha eclair!” (In my seat under the window I went tumbling down into the pools of hopeless devotion to this brazen-voiced redhead.) “How could we have pictures without colors! So — ” she addressed the whole class once more — “we have three things that make up a picture. What are they, now — ?”
Shape, line, and color…
“What are they, again?”
Shape, line, and color!
“Once more…”
Shape, line, and color!
What I knew was that we were chanting and having great fun doing it. What I didn’t know was that we were inscribing the tenets of a formalist esthetic on the pedestal of our souls.
In the essay from which I’ve taken my epigraph, Calvin Tomkins locates the same three terms in the same order to describe the esthetic of minimalism — that austere outgrowth of abstract expressionism that came to the fore in the late sixties, once the first furor over pop art had died down. But it was back in September of 1951 that these three terms rang out in the art room on the sixth floor at 89th Street — as they had rung for a handful of Septembers already.
“But there’s still one problem,” Gwenny returned to the tacked-up paper. “How do we put the shapes, lines, and colors together in our pictures?”
“With a brush!” someone volunteered, brightly.
“With a brush!” Gwenny declared, darkly.
Then she repeated, “With a brush…”
Now she made a sour face: “With a brush…”
Breathlessly we waited to see what these accents meant.
It was disdain, but what sort none of us knew.
“With a brush…?” Gwenny shook her head. “Oh, you’re just too clever by half!” Again she took up the crayon. “Pay attention now. Because this isn’t easy. I’m going to put a shape in my picture. But do I put it up here, like this — ?” She drew another amoeboid, but it began in the corner, and in a moment she was drawing off the paper and on the wall itself.
“No!” we chorused.
“Well, why not?”
Someone called: “Because it goes off the paper!”
“Yes,” Gwenny admitted. “But I want you to say that in another way.”
So we tried for a while. Pretty soon we came up with, “It goes over the edge.”
“And what edge is that?” Gwenny prompted.
A minute later, we’d ascertained that it was the outside edge of the picture that was her perimeter of concern.
“So, once more. What is it that makes up a picture?” Shape, line, and color! (We knew we were to chant it with her and came in on cue.) “And how do we arrange them, in order to make it a picture?” (By now we knew the second part of it too.) “In relationship to the outside edge! That’s wonderful. Now, go, loves, and spend the rest of the period making just the most beautiful paintings in the world!”
We broke from our seats for the paints and papers around us that, for the last ten minutes of Gwenny’s lesson, I, for one, had been itching for.