"Important artists come from all classes of society, Lieutenant, and they seldom make much money till after they're dead," Nauman said bitterly. "Then it's the entrepreneurs and promoters like Riley who cash in on their works. Do you know Karoly's paintings?"
Sigrid shook her head. "No. I think
I've heard the name, but you were right when you guessed that twentieth-century art doesn't much interest me."
Perversely he was pleased that she didn't apologize or make a pretense of excepting his work. He had always preferred indifference over the empty flattery of someone who hadn't the least understanding of what he was striving for. Open hostility would be even better because anger implied that the viewer took the work seriously enough to feel challenged by Nauman's assumptions.
Their waiter returned to clear the table, and by this time Sigrid was so used to the tavern's scruffy ambience that it didn't outrage her to see him use one corner of his dirty apron to wipe it dry before setting down the tray of coffee utensils.
Nauman stirred sugar into his cup, drew on his pipe and leaned back in the heavy oak chair. He hoped he wasn't getting pedantic. That was the danger when one was so innately a teacher; it was so hard not to lecture. Especially when one's audience was as receptive as this policewoman seemed to be.
"Janos Karoly," he said slowly, "was probably Riley Quinn's one foray into altruism. It turned out so profitably that it's always puzzled me that he never tried it again. Unless Mike Szabo's right, and it wasn't honest altruism.
"It all started after the war," He paused and looked at Sigrid's face. Only around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth were there faint beginnings of age lines. "The Second World War," he clarified carefully. "There had been a few abstract exhibitions before the war, but abstract expressionism didn't arrive until '46 and '47. Paris was still the international art center of the world, and everyone went there. The great, the near great and the merely hopeful-Soulages, Hartung, Poliakoff, Appel-and not just artists but critics and historians. Riley, too, clutching his discharge papers from the Stars and Stripes and looking for firsthand data for his postgraduate studies."
"Stars and Stripes was a military newspaper, wasn't it?"
"Right. He'd been one of the feature writers on the staff. That was before I met him, but we were all the same-lusty young cockerels playing King of the Mountain on the art heaps of Paris. Janos Karoly was there, and one of the more established artists. A fairly respected practitioner of tachism, though not really in the master ranks"
"What's tachism?" she asked.
"Literally it means spot painting. Refers to the way an artist puts paint on a canvas. Someone more calligraphic might brush on wide slashes and bands of color. A tachist adds spot to spot or wedge to wedge and-"
"I thought that was called impressionism," Sigrid objected. "Like what's his name? Seurat?"
"Seurat used very small pellets of color, and his pictures were all quite representational. Something like newspaper pictures built up of black dots. The tachists were abstract, and in the purest examples their pictures became loosely structured clusters and patches of color. They downplayed line to concentrate on color and texture.
"That's the way Karoly was painting when Riley first met him. It was all very competent, but nothing to set your blood on fire. Still he was almost sixty then, and he'd knocked around Europe long enough to have known everyone-Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, and the Bauhaus people-and Riley was impressed. What Karoly thought of Riley… well, he had an acid tongue, but Riley's French was limited, and his Hungarian nonexistent, so Karoly's choicest remarks went over his head. Things were never as bad in Paris as they were in other European capitals, but there were still shortages and rationing, and the black market was expensive. With his American dollars and his American military connections Riley could wangle extra amenities. Karoly allowed him to bring food and wine and coal and sit in his studio and listen to him reminisce about art and artists. I suppose it was mutually beneficial."
"At last, though, Riley came back to finish his dissertation, and Karoly decided he was an old man who should die in his native land, although I believe Hungary was the one European country he'd assiduously avoided for the previous forty-five years. Nobody heard from him after that. If they thought of him at all, it was probably to assume that he was dead. Then came the Hungarian Revolution.
Were you old enough to remember that?"
"I remember," Sigrid said, ignoring his allusion to age. "Tanks and people running in the streets."
"How Janos Karoly got mixed up in the political mess, no one could ever understand. He didn't even know himself-maybe they thought his paintings were too decadent, who can say? His name wound up on a proscribed list, but somehow he got out of the country and into Italy, and the first person he ran into was Riley Quinn, who was in Rome appraising some things for the Klaustadt Gallery when Karoly wandered in with a roll of canvases under his arm. Riley took one look and immediately talked him into applying for an American visa. He arranged the flight and found him a studio."
"He could still paint? He must have been nearly seventy by then," said Sigrid, who'd been keeping track of the dates.
Nauman nodded. "I remember how he seemed older than God when I saw him then." There was wry self-mockery in his smile. "Somehow seventy doesn't sound as old as it used to."
A burst of heavy male laughter arose from a far table. The bar at the front of the deep room was well lined now with serious drinkers-longshoremen, mechanics and three crewmen from a German liner that had docked that morning. The tavern had grown warm enough to make Sigrid take off her shapeless gray jacket. Underneath was a chastely tailored white silk shirt. Man-styled with buttons down the front, pointed collar tips and close-fitting cuffs at the thin wrists, it had survived a day of city grime and polluted air to remain pristinely white. As she leaned forward to pull the jacket sleeves free, the white material stretched tautly over small, high breasts, briefly outlining the lace tracery of her bra beneath.
And wasn't that interesting, thought Nauman fleetingly. All tailored and buttoned up on the outside, lace lingerie beneath. It was enough to make him revive his theory of repressed romanticism.
"If Karoly's work was only conventionally good, why would Professor Quinn go to so much trouble?" Sigrid asked. "He must have met lots of well-known artists by that time."
"You're catching on to Riley's character."
Nauman approved. "You're right; he'd learned a lot since postwar Paris, and he no longer sat at any artist's feet. But Karoly was exceptional. Everyone thought he'd done all he was capable of. Very few artists go on breaking new ground in their old age, but Karoly was a maverick. When he got back to Hungary, he was very isolated from the artistic community, and somehow in his solitude he discovered a whole new wellspring of creativity within himself and completely transcended tachism. Oh, he still used the basic techniques, but he'd tightened his structure. The subjects were mostly still lifes-fruits and flowers and luminous bowls and vases. Incredible handling of color and shape. The National Gallery has six of those paintings, and they almost justify a trip to Washington. Riley did his damnedest to discourage him, but Karoly insisted on giving them to the government in gratitude for his sanctuary. Also by way of thumbing his nose at the Communist regime in Hungary." There was jaundiced cynicism in Nauman's tone.
"So far as I know-and I only saw him once or twice that last year-he never questioned why Riley would go to so much trouble and expense for him. He didn't read English, so he had no idea how strong a reputation Riley was building as an astute critic and authority. Karoly was just as arrogant and scornful as he'd been in Paris. Thought Riley was a toad but a useful toad; that he was still a star-struck admirer whose only function was to furnish food, shelter and painting materials so the master could get on with his work. It was the old biter-bit thing, but justified somehow because he was still discovering new frontiers when he died. If the Whitney weren't closed, I'd haul you over right now to see the painting that was on his easel when he died-New World Nexus, where unexpected representational elements begin to show up."