Points, lines, circles, triangles, squares, polygons… these are the terms we should think in when we begin to sketch a human painting. Afterwards we will have to add shading.
'If you think we're waxworks… you ought to pay, you know…' 'Contrariwise!… If you think we're alive, you ought to speak!'
A point is not really a shape. Anyone who thinks a point is round is mistaken. A point exists in so far as interconnecting lines exist. Yet lines and everything else, all other shapes and bodies, are made up of points. A point is the essential invisible, the unmeasurable inevitable. God himself may be a point, solitary and remote in His perfect eternity, thinks Marcus.
Marcus Weiss is holding up an invisible point between his closed fingers. Friends, this is more complicated than it seems. The gesture is: left hand held out, palm of the hand facing upward, five fingers forming a little summit. If the tips are close enough together, the hole in the middle disappears in the curves of flesh. And there, right in the middle, is the point Weiss is holding up. You think it's easy? Think again, friends, it's really complicated.
When she first started her sketches, Kate Niemeyer put a ping-pong ball on the tip of his fingers. In the next sketch, the ball was replaced by a marble; after that a bean, and then a pea, just like in children's stories. Finally, Kate decided there should be nothing. 'The idea is the ball is still there, but invisible. You're offering it to the public. People will look at you and ask: what's he got between his fingers? That will catch their attention, and they'll come closer.' Marcus understands that curiosity is a terrific bait for any artist who knows how to use it.
'That afternoon, he had been holding up the invisible point for several hours. A girl with blonde curls, orange dress and red glasses (one of the last visitors) had stood up on tiptoe to see what Marcus was hiding in his fingers. Weiss was unable to see her expression when she eventually realised there was nothing there – as a work of art, he was forced to continue looking straight out in front of him, his eyes painted white. He wondered what on earth such a small child was doing in the gallery, where the works were meant to be for adults. Marcus would have banned himself to children under thirteen. He had no children of his own (what painting could have?), but he felt a great respect for them, and considered his 'attire' as Niemeyer's work far from suitable for them: he was completely naked, his body spray-painted bronze, his penis and testicles (hairless, visible) a matt white colour, the same as his eyes. A crown of yellow and blue feathers with purple tips, shaped like an Aztec plume or a tropical bird's crest, covered his brow. His crafted muscles, shaped over the years with the patience of a carpenter, shone individually with a metallic bronze, throwing off shifting shadows and glints under the halogen lights.
Tired of holding up nothing, he was pleased it would soon be time to close. He realised the gallery had shut when he saw the maintenance man for Philip Mossberg's Rhythm/Balance come into the room. Rhythm/Balance was the painting on show opposite him. It was a seventeen-year-old canvas called Aspasia Danilou, painted in gentle, almost washed-out colours, which hid nothing of her anatomy. Her pubic hair was visible, because Mossberg always used non-depilated canvases for his works. Aspasia blinked, stirred, handed the satin sheet she had been holding in her left hand to the technician, and skipped off to the bathroom, waving to Marcus as she left. Until tomorrow, Marcus, see you then; of course you will, we'll be staring at each other all day – Beautiful Aspasia was not a bad canvas. Marcus thought she would go far, but she was only seventeen and this was her first original. When she had arrived in the gallery, he had tried to pick her up, but she had made several excuses and systematically refused his advances, until he was forced to realise that, in some areas of life, Aspasia already had considerable experience.
Marcus was Kate Niemeyer's work Do You Want to Play With Me? He was priced at twelve thousand euros, and was not sure he would be sold. He was the last to leave the gallery. There was no technician to help him, no one came to take his plume of feathers off: he had to make his own way out. The hand he used to hold nothing up with hurt a little. The whole arm, in fact.
'Au revoir, Habib.' 'Au revoir, Mr Weiss.'
He kept his bare black and bronze painted feet well away from the smooth track Habib's vacuum cleaner was making. He got on very well with the cleaning foreman on that floor. Before coming to Munich, Habib had lived in Avignon, and Weiss, who knew and admired that city (he had twice been exhibited in a gallery on the banks of the Rhone), liked to offer the Moroccan cleaner beer and cigarettes, and to practise his French. Habib the Great also went in for Zen meditation, which was guaranteed to endear him to Marcus. The two of them shared their books and thoughts.
That night though all he said to Habib was goodbye. He was in a hurry.
Would she be waiting for him? He hoped so, because he could not bear to think otherwise. They had met the previous evening, but Marcus had enough experience to know she was not the kind to take things lightly. Whoever she might be, and whatever she wanted from him, Brenda was serious about it.
He walked down the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor. Sieglinde, who was Dryad by Herbert Rinsermann, was already bent over the wash basin when Marcus came in. She had her head under the tap and was briskly rubbing her hair. Her athletic figure was like a flesh longbow, without an atom of fat. The fake brambles that were wrapped around her in the work were now propped against the wall, glistening with red points of artificial blood. The intricate swirl of Rinsermann's signature decorated her left ankle. Marcus and Sieglinde had met two years earlier during classes Ludwig Werner had held in Berlin for canvases of all ages. They had been friends ever since. Now they had coincided again in the Max Ernst gallery.
Marcus bent over next to her, taking care not to damage his plume of feathers, and boomed out a greeting.
'Good evening.'
Sieglinde's face emerged from the water, streaked with tiny pearls.
'Hi there, Marcus! How are things?'
'Not too bad,' he smiled enigmatically as he removed his crest. 'You're very pleased with yourself today. Has someone bought you?' In your dreams.' 'Another original in sight then?'
'Maybe.'
Sieglinde turned towards him, hands and buttocks pressed against the edge of the washbowl. Her short hair was like a wet golden helmet. She looked at Weiss with all the mockery of a smart nineteen-year-old.
'Hey, that's great. I'm fed up with seeing you painted bronze. And might I be allowed to know the name of the artist who wants to go down in history by doing something with you, Mr Weiss?' 'Mind your own business,' Marcus said, only half jokingly.
Sieglinde burst out laughing and carried on drying herself. Marcus went into the shower and hung a bottle of solvent on the taps. The oil paint on his body began to wash down below his knees. He turned and splashed in the welcome, pleasurable jet of water. Through the half-open door he caught glimpses of Sieglinde's anatomy, brief flashes of her youthful muscles. Ah youth, a point of no return, he thought. They buy you more quickly and pay more when you're a young canvas. He recalled that Rinsermann had been able to sell Sieglinde as a seasonal outdoor piece to an ancient Bavarian family. It's never easy to sell a seasonal work, because they are on show for only a few months each year, the summer in Dryad's case. Marcus had seen the work several times. He did not particularly like Rinsermann, but he thought Dryad was quite good. It was a sort of wood nymph painted in diluted orange, ochre and pink tones, and covered in brambles whose thorns were apparently caught in the naked body. The expression on the work's face was a triumph: a mixture of fear, surprise and pain. But in Marcus' opinion, the best thing about the work was its owner. One of those a painting only meets once every ten years or so. Not only had he decided to install Sieglinde in his garden for three years before he substituted her (which meant steady work for three months and the possibility of more the rest of the year) but he also saw no problem with lending her for temporary exhibitions in the city, like this one at the Max Ernst, which allowed Sieglinde to earn an extra one
