Works in progress: Jack Clark in Paris, deux

The Louvre, Paris

     As a certified museum guy, I have to admit that frequent contributor Jack Clark's pride at never visiting the Louvre left me a little ... baffled. It's like not liking chocolate — possible, yes, but not exactly something to be proud of. I'll let you decide if he makes his case. As for the painting that he highlights, I deliberately tucked it into the body of the story, and not the top, so it wouldn't go up to illustrate the post on Facebook, causing the behemoth to perhaps flag and block it as a species of pornography, which is just sad.

     Jack does sidestep the obvious question of what is happening in the painting. According to Wikipedia, the nipple tweak was seen as somehow symbolic of the lady on the right being pregnant with Henry IV's child. In more recent times, it was seen as a wink at lesbianism, though the two subjects are sisters. The sort of puzzle one misses by not frequenting museums.

     Three of my siblings visited us in Paris the other week. We took my brother Kevin and his wife Joanne to hear some music in a club housed in a boat docked on the left bank of the Seine. Kevin’s the real musician in the family. I wasn’t a bit surprised when he ended up on stage singing and playing a borrowed bass guitar.
     My sisters Kathleen and Ryan went to every museum they could find, without me. I didn’t have any problems in that boat on the river but just listening to them talk about the various museums they’d visited made me feel somewhat seasick.
     Being colorblind is a blessing that I’ve used to keep myself out of scores of museums. It’s about more than my abbreviated color perception. I like my art one piece at a time. Museums stuffed full make me dizzy. Once I almost saw blood.
     That was on a visit to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Museum in Cody, Wyoming, back in the late 1980s. I’d always heard it was a great place and I’m a big fan of the old West as portrayed in books and movies. But sad to say, the museum was just as boring as most of the others I’ve tried.
     They had a bunch of Indian mannequins dressed in authentic Indian wear standing around Teepees and looking very. . . Well, actually I forget how they looked. That’s how unimpressive it was. But the woman I was with was having a great time. She’d once worked at the Art Institute so this was right up her avenue. I followed along trying to pretend I was interested and then I wondered where the museum had gotten the clothes. “Probably off of dead Indians,” I answered myself.
      Once I had the thought, I found what looked like bullet holes everywhere, in the back, in the shoulder, in the side. And suddenly, in the midst of horror, I was having a great time. “Look at this one,” I said to my friend. “I mean, moths don’t eat through leather, do they?”
      “Look, right there in the lower back. Isn’t that where the kidneys are?”
     “Jack, would you please shut up?” my friend whispered. “Everybody’s listening.”
     Shut up? She had to be kidding. Here was some actual history. Those Indian villages were a fantasy: the Indians living in peace. When did that ever happen? Not after 1492.
     Some years later, I was driving a taxi and my passenger said he was a history professor at Yale. “What’s your specialty?” I asked. When he told me it was the American West, I asked if he’d ever been to the museum in Cody.
     “Oh sure. I go every other year or so.”
     I told him about those holes and he promised to take a look on his next visit. Who knows? Maybe my observation made it into a Yale class or paper.
     But where did they get the clothes? Who did they belong to? How did they die? Who was on the other end of those bullets? I wouldn’t mind hearing those answers.
     In any museum, I would probably find the answer to, How did they get all this stuff, more interesting than the stuff itself. And remember, most museums have even more stuff in storage.
     Speaking of museums and Paris, I did go to the Louvre once, but I only got as far as the gift shop. This was decades back, I was on my way to Paris to write with my friend Bob Meyer. He was a Chicago artist, writer, and all-around craftsman and artisan, who had moved to Paris to be with his young son. We were turning the 1931 Fritz Lang movie M into the play M the Murderer.

      Bob Horn, another Chicago artist, wanted me to ask Bob to go to the Louvre gift shop and pick up a postcard of the painting, Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters. In the 1594 work, two women in their early 20s are sitting in a bathtub. An older woman is in the background, looking down at her knitting. The girl on the left is reaching out, tweaking one of the other girl’s nipples. Horn was planning a painting based on the original. “Bob will know the painting,” he said.
     (You may notice a trend in those last few paragraphs: We’ve all run out of original ideas.)
     When I got to Paris, Bob Meyer said, “I’ve been here for eight years and I haven’t been in the Louvre yet. I’m not going for Bob Horn.” They were the best of friends, of course, and both were involved with the founding of the NAB Gallery in Chicago in 1974.
     But Bob gave me directions to the Louvre. And then on my legal pad he drew a rough sketch of the postcard Bob Horn wanted. “Just show ‘em that,” he said. “They’ll know the painting.”
     I wasn’t so sure. Bob could make the simplest drawing look sexy and on the border of obscene. But I didn’t see anything like that in the sketch. I folded it and headed for the Louvre.
     On the way, I passed rue Rivoli where there were several postcard stores. I went into one after the other and showed them the sketch. “The Louvre,” everyone said, and some were kind enough to point the way.
     So I went to the Louvre and down to the gift shop where there are thousands and thousands of postcards. How would I ever find the right one? There were two teenage girls behind the counter. I held up my drawing and they both immediately turned bright red. Bob had done it again. Here they were, working in a museum with thousands of nudes. They probably never gave any of them a second glance. But my old friend Bob, with a five-second drawing scribbled on a yellow legal pad, had somehow ignited a flash fire.
     After the girls recovered, they knew exactly in which aisle I would find the postcard. I bought a few extras.
     Aside from transposing the sisters, Bob had drawn the scene perfectly from memory. I guess that’s what you learn in art school. I don’t know where he’d learned to hint at pornography without ever crossing into it.
     I looked at Bob’s sketch for days, but I could never find what had made the two girls blush and Bob, who died in Paris in 2021, wasn’t giving away trade secrets. I’ve got several of his drawings at home. When I look, I rarely see those hidden elements. I think they come with the shock of first viewing. Almost every woman who’s set foot in my apartment has skipped past most of my other art to take long looks at Bob’s drawings. I wish I knew what they were seeing.
     Maybe if I’d spent more time in museums.