The Italian Teacher(92)
It was three stories up, and I expected the fall to last longer. If my head hit first, I would have been finished. My nurses gave me hell for picking off the dressings, but I liked seeing the scars. Later I heard that many important people spent their childhoods as invalids. Jack Kennedy, Edith Piaf, Lionel Barrymore, H. G. Wells. It’s useful to think you’re going to die. If it doesn’t wreck you, you do what you want afterward.
Also new to Pinch are stories of Bear traveling around Europe after the war. He spent a period in northern Spain, not far across the border from the cottage. During a two-year fellowship in Rome, Bear was expelled for bringing “questionable women” into a work space granted by the American Academy. In internal academy documents, Bear is recorded as describing the women as “artists’ models,” saying that if they also happened to be ladies of the night, well, there’s a rich tradition in painting women of that trade—ask Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Schiele. The administrators didn’t agree. So he took a dingy studio down the hill in the shadow of Regina Coeli prison, converting a former grain depot into his art space, later the home of his third wife and their only son, Charles.
Other biographical snippets catch Pinch’s attention too: His father was engaged in a torrid affair with Mishmish Shapiro. And Dad moved permanently to Italy, not from love for his family there but from antipathy for contemporaries in New York with whom he’d fallen out—hostilities that cost him a place in various landmark shows, including the 1959 Documenta exhibition in Kassel and the Guggenheim show of sixty-four American painters in 1961.
Bear then abandoned the family in Rome and returned to New York because of pressure from his dealer, Victor Petros, a man famed for the quip: “Success in art is fifty percent timing, fifty percent geography. The rest is talent.”
After Bear fell out of fashion in the sixties, he endured years of personal doubt, womanizing compulsively, drinking to medicate his knee and back pain. “When an artist disappears for this long,” Connor writes, “it is rarely a tale of mirth.” After decades of anguish, the biographer says, the late portraits mark Bavinsky’s redemption.
History will never know that Bear was simply blocked: painting and burning, painting and burning, unable to believe in what he created anymore. Not a single genuine work survives from the midsixties onward—around the same period that Pinch went to Larchmont.
In Connor’s manuscript, two anecdotes particularly amuse Pinch: that the young Bear—caught by his first wife with a lover—had staged a wrestling match between the two women, and that Bear had once ordered Natalie to shear off her hair before he painted her to gauge the exact shape of her head. Connor interviewed Marsden for the chapter about Bear’s death, and these chestnuts must have come up. Pinch refrains from correcting either yarn. His intent is not for the biography to be accurate, but to be indelible. The only part Pinch asks to change is a line describing one of Bear’s sons as “a onetime would-be painter who ended up teaching Italian.”
“I’m a professor of Italian at the Utz School of Language in London,” he tells Connor. “Actually, no—make it ‘an Italian teacher at Utz.’ I’m not a professor.”
“Drop the painter bit entirely?”
“I bet you wrote a couple of sonnets as a teenager, but you’d feel pretty silly if someone referred to you as ‘the would-be poet.’”
“Point taken. For now and ever, you are the Italian teacher.”
75
Among those who attend the Faces show in Brooklyn is the noted academic and author Cilla Barrows. In an email she raves to Pinch about what she saw. He rereads her note, a bolt of joy each time. “You should have told me you were going!” he responds. Back when he composed letters on paper, he didn’t exclaim constantly. But something about online exchanges turns his prose into musical-theater dialogue:
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Tell you? How come? Is there a VIP lounge at Petros?
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
If only! So you really liked it?
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Muchissimo. Thoughts of Sickert, Lucian Freud, Soutine as always.
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
Dad hated to be compared, but those are all great painters!
Priscilla Barrows <[email protected]> wrote:
Let’s just agree the paintings are very Bavinsky. It took me a few decades, but I get Bear Bavinsky now. I can even boast of having once met the great man.
Charles Bavinsky <[email protected]> wrote:
You even dated the great man’s son!
Why does anyone reach out to an old flame? It’s never entirely innocent. He sees her in their Paris hotel room, lying on the bed, her shirt off. Pinch shakes his head, partly to rid himself of a sexual image while at his workplace, partly because he and Barrows erred—we should be together still. He reads her message again, whispering to the screen, “I painted those. Barrows? That was me.”
76
Pinch always planned to sell the Faces to whichever Qatari royal or Kazakh mining mogul or Italian fashion house owner bid the most, irrespective of how distant the paintings ended from public view. Actually, the farther the better. It was safer that way. And he wanted none of the profits, having always planned to split the money among his siblings—a reparations fund from Dad. Anyway, that was the idea.