The Light of Paris(2)

The kids, who had been chattering enthusiastically as we walked, of course chose that moment to fall sullenly silent. Elementary-aged children seemed almost violent in their desire to speak, hurling their entire bodies into the air when they raised their hands, as though they were controlled by marionette strings. But these high schoolers were draped with languid adolescent ease that didn’t hide the twitch of their eyes, their anxious fingers worrying their pencils, the edges of their sketch pads. I had thought for sure the Renaissance paintings might get them, all those nudes with their tender, pale skin and tactfully placed hands and leaves, but they seemed only politely interested.

“Come on, people,” I said. “I’m getting you out of school for the day. The least you can do is answer my questions.”

Miss Pine and a couple of the kids grinned. Eliza, a girl with long brown braids and a T-shirt bearing a faded print of Munch’s The Scream, raised her hand. She reminded me a little of myself at that age—a spray of pimples across her forehead, curls breaking free of her braids, a thick, sturdy body. She held a paintbrush between her fingers, perhaps in case of an unexpected art emergency, which kind of made me want to give her a hug.

“My savior!” I said. “Pray, my lady, speak.”

Eliza flushed a little as her classmates turned to look at her, but when she spoke, her voice was loud and clear and confident. Or at least as confident as a teenage girl could be, her voice lilting up into questions at the end. “They were really interested in, like, Classical art? Like, Greeks?”

“And the Romans, yeah!” I said. I was so excited someone was actually talking that I might have spoken a little too loudly, because a boy named Lam, his black hair swept into a style that made him look as though he were standing in a wind tunnel, actually took a step back. I cleared my throat and tried for something a little less enthusiastic, the reserved voice I used in the rest of my life, where I spent all my time talking about things I didn’t care about. “They were fascinated by Greco-Roman culture, and you can see those influences everywhere. Take this painting, for instance,” I said, pointing at a piece by an Italian artist. “Do you see these sculptures running along the top of the building in the background?”

The kids leaned forward and I suppressed a grin. So they were interested after all. It was just a matter of breaking through their external cool to find the real people underneath.

Lam spoke up. “It looks like those friezes on the Parthenon.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” I said. “And that’s not an accident. They were trying to revitalize art, so they went looking for the pinnacle of artistic achievement, and they found it in Classical art.”

“So they were copying?” a short, slender girl asked. I couldn’t remember her name. When she had introduced herself, I was distracted by how small and insubstantial she seemed, as though she were a shadow her owner had left behind.

“It’s not copying,” a boy named Hunter said, his words dripping with disdain. “It’s like, inspiration.” The shadow girl dropped her chin, shrinking even further into herself, and I wanted to rush to her rescue. Hunter was good-looking in the irritatingly effortless way some teenage boys have, their features delicate and girlishly pretty, and I could tell from the way the other kids arranged themselves around him that he was the center of their social constellation.

Fortunately, Miss Pine stepped in before I had to. “Dial down the attitude, Hunter,” she said mildly, and I watched the kids shift again, Hunter deflating slightly, the shadow girl glancing up from underneath her eyelashes, the others looking somewhat relieved. I gave Miss Pine a mental high five. “It’s a fair moral question, given how much you all get harangued about plagiarism.”

“And that’s really what we’re here to talk about today, right? Where artists get their ideas, their techniques, their style,” I said.

“From each other,” Eliza said, waving her paintbrush at me.

“Exactly,” I said. “Why don’t we go check out the Neoclassicists and see some more examples?”

Our conversation was livelier in the Neoclassical room, where I managed to engage the kids in a conversation about the Romans, possibly because I mentioned vomitoriums. Proof that no one ever progresses past the age of thirteen, and when nudity fails, gross-out humor is always a good idea.

When the kids had exhausted their (fairly impressive) repertoire of throw-up jokes, I gave them a few minutes to linger in the room. Some of them were sketching wildly, and I felt my fingers itch as I watched them. The self-conscious tightness that had surrounded them fell away, and their inner eager elementary schoolers sprang out. Long ago, that would have been me, so desperate to create I could hardly keep my hands still.

I leaned against the wall, and Miss Pine came to stand beside me. “Anyway,” she said, continuing our earlier conversation as though it had never been interrupted, “teaching is really the best way to stay in touch with my own art. If I’m encouraging them to create, I’d feel like a fraud if I didn’t do it myself. What about you? Are you an artist?”

“Oh, no. I mean, I took art in school, but that’s not, I mean, it wasn’t real,” I said hurriedly, lest she get the wrong idea.

“Really?” She raised a pale eyebrow. “But you talk about it so passionately. I just assumed . . .”