The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(41)
“Yeah.” I reached out to skim my fingers across the canvas. “Why doesn’t he have you come up with your own ideas?”
“Because, when you’re searching for your own style, it can be useful to try on those of successful artists. Nathaniel says we should see what we can steal from them. So, like, if I imitate Picasso, really try to do the same thing with my brushstrokes that he did with his, I’ll probably fail, but I’ll understand something about his process and so,” and she put on a Nathaniel voice, “‘I’ll learn something about my own! About my soul!’”
“He really loves his souls,” I said.
“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “He got kind of angry at me for changing out some of Picasso’s elements here. Said I was straying too far from the assignment. During critique, he said the nicest things about the paintings that looked like exact copies. It seemed kind of stupid, honestly. I was still working with Picasso’s style.”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to my next question. “Does he just have a thing for Picasso?”
“No,” she said. “He works in conjunction with the art history teacher. Hands out a list of painters that she teaches in her first-month overview. It’s like this whole project—we study the painter we choose, their life, their history, really get a feel for their work. It counts for both classes.”
“Who else do people imitate?” She gave me a funny look—I was asking too many questions. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down. “I’m just . . . it’d be good to have a jump on this assignment if I ended up coming here.”
Marie-Helene laughed. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “Go get me another coffee from the café, and we can try a little breaking and entering.” At my shocked look, she amended, “Into my friends’ studios. What did you think I meant?”
At that moment, she sounded so much like Holmes that my stomach turned. Was that why I wanted to immediately run off and do what she told me to? Stupid, so stupid, I thought, what is it with these girls? Why do I always end up trailing after them? But this one studied under Nathaniel, and she had a group of friends who were forging paintings, whether or not they knew that was what they were doing, and no, I didn’t want to be with her, but she had this immaculate spray of freckles across her nose, and so of course I told her yes, what kind of latte did she want this time?
“YOU KNOW, THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST NOT-DATE I’VE EVER had,” Marie-Helene said, pushing open the door to her friend Naomi’s studio. It wasn’t real breaking and entering, of course; there wasn’t even any lockpicking involved. People had their personal supplies stored in strongboxes under their tables, but the spaces appeared to be communally used.
“Naomi did her project on Joan Miró. A lot of people did. Professor Ziegler was pretty funny about it, actually,” she said, and now I had Nathaniel’s last name. “He had an unofficial prize for the best one and hooked them up with some kiosk outside the Centre Pompidou—the museum—that sells imitation paintings to tourists. Supposedly you make pretty good money doing it.”
Naomi had imitated Joan Miró. Rolf, in the studio next door, had chosen Da Vinci. The next was Twombly, all painted squiggles and sparks, and then a black-and-white Ernst collage, where a girl in an old-fashioned gown held an iPhone to her ear (“Nathaniel really hated that one,” she said), and then an American Gothic, a really terrible imitation of Starry Night (actually, I thought, maybe Simon could go to this school), and finally, as I caught Marie-Helene not-so-subtly checking the time, we wound up in her friend Hanna’s studio. The girl with the paint-splattered backpack, the one who warned me about the men at the pool party.
“She’s from Munich,” Marie-Helene explained. “She really loves all the twentieth-century German painters. A lot of us don’t like taking art history—we’d rather make our own—but Hanna really works hard at it. She’s a great artist, and she’s really smart.”
Langenberg. I kept my face neutral. “As smart as you?” I asked.
“You tell me,” Marie-Helene said with a shrug, and began to pull the paintings back one at a time for me to see.
They were all surrealist landscapes. Every last one of them done in clashing neon colors, horrible to look at. No hushed scenes in sitting rooms. No dark colors. No people, even. And maybe my taste in art was just underdeveloped, or maybe I was just frustrated to again have hit a brick wall. But when we got to the last of them, I knew I was done.
It was a relief.
“Maybe I just drank too much last night,” I told her, taking off my hat to rub at my temples. “I think I just need a nap. Sorry to be so lame.”
“Not lame,” she said, and took the hat from me to prop on her own head. She grinned. “I actually had a lot of fun today.”
I had, too. Almost a normal kind of fun, when I used to go hang out at the pub on long afternoons, having the kinds of conversations where I didn’t feel like I needed an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a scorekeeper. Where my friends liked me and I liked them, and that was the whole of it. When I could go home and bicker with my sister and read a book in bed and not worry that everything I cared about was retreating slowly out of my grip.
The kind of fun where nobody’s shooting at you, I thought, and when I took my hat back from Marie-Helene, I kissed her on the cheek. Before I could pull away, she snaked a finger through my belt loop. “I could see you when I come back,” she said quietly. “I think I might like that.”