SUITABLE FOR FRAMING: A family of experts.
by DAVID SEDARIS

New Yorker

Before it was moved out near the fairgrounds, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists—she the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”

“Me, too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.

I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was around my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”

This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.

Ruth treated me like an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”

“Is he?” she said.

“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”

She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration.

“Good move,” she said.

The art gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”

In 1970, the only art work in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my four sisters and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.

“What more do you want from a group picture of five spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along—I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me—Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said, “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”

Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. “Mr. Balloon Man,” she called it.

“I’m just not certain he really needs that top hat,” I told her.

And my mother said “Oh, really?” in a way that meant: “If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”

It bothered me that she’d bought something without asking my advice, and so I continued to offer my thoughtful criticism, hoping it might teach her a lesson.

Her next piece was a grandfather clock with a body made of walnut and a human face pounded from what appeared to be a Chinese gong. The face wasn’t realistic, but what she called “semi-abstract,” a word she had picked up from Ruth. A word that was supposed to be mine. I didn’t know exactly how much the clock had cost, but I knew it was expensive. She called it “Mr. Creech,” in honor of the artist, and when I tried to explain that art was not a pet you gave a little name to she told me she could call it whatever the hell she wanted to.

“Should I put Mr. Creech next to Mr. Balloon Man, or does that make the dining room too busy?”

“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “You’re the expert.”

Then my father was introduced to Ruth, and he became an expert as well. Art brought my parents together in a way that nothing else had, and because their interest was new they were able to share it without being competitive. Suddenly they were a team, the Ed and Nancy Kienholz of Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Your mother’s got a real eye,” my father boasted—this in regard to “Cracked Man,” a semi-abstract face made by the same potter who had crafted our new coffee table. Dad wasn’t in the habit of throwing money around, but this, he explained, was an investment, something that, like stocks and bonds, would steadily appreciate in value, ultimately going “right through the roof.”

“And in the meantime we all get to enjoy it,” my mother said. “All of us except Mr. Crabby,” by which she meant me.

The allure of art had always been that my parents knew nothing about it. It had been a private interest, something between me and Gretchen. Now, though, everyone was in on it. Even my Greek grandmother had an opinion, that being that unless Jesus was in the picture it wasn’t worth looking at. Yiayia was not discriminating—a Giotto or a Rouault, it made no difference so long as the subject was either nailed to a cross or raising his arms before a multitude. She liked her art to tell a story, and though that particular story didn’t interest me, I liked the same thing. It’s why I preferred the museum’s “Market Scene on a Quay” to its Kenneth Noland. When it came to making art, however, I tended toward the Noland, as measuring out triangles was a lot easier than painting a realistic-looking haddock.

Before my parents started hanging out at the gallery, they thought I was a trailblazer. Now they saw me for what I was: not just a copycat but a lazy one. Looking at my square of green imposed atop a pumpkin-colored background, my father stepped back, saying, “That’s just like what’s-his-name, that guy who lives at the Outer Banks.”

“Actually, it’s more like Ellsworth Kelly,” I said.

“Well, he must have gotten his ideas from the guy at the Outer Banks.”

At the age of fifteen, I was maybe not the expert I made myself out to be, but I did own a copy of “The History of Art,” and knew that eastern North Carolina was no hotbed of artistic expression. I was also fairly certain that no serious painter would devote half the canvas to his signature, or stick an exclamation point at the end of his name.

“That shows what you know,” my mother said. “Art isn’t about following the rules—it’s about breaking them. Right, Lou?”

And my father said, “You got it.”

The next thing they bought was a portrait by a man I’ll call Bradlington. “He’s an alcoholic,” my mother announced, this as if his drinking somehow made him more authentic.

With the exception of my grandmother, everyone liked the Bradlington, especially me. It brought to mind a few of the Goyas I’d seen in my art-history book—the paintings he did toward the end, when the faces were just sort of slashed on. “It’s very moody,” I pronounced. “Very . . . invocative.”

A few months later, they bought another Bradlington, a portrait of a boy lying on his back in a ditch. “He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching art work to décor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as the Navajo, and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high, and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.

My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room, and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.

My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead them to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of Mr. Creech,” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”

I was in my second year of college by then, and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known, and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art-history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”

“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”

“I’m sorry, but the name means nothing to me.”

As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in ARTnews rather than Artforum, their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t hear it. Maybe today my art-history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at van Gogh!”

“So will every artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a van tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”

“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough just to be dead—you’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but, as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your art work doesn’t look like art.”

“And you’re the expert on that?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.

I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing—things requiring actual skill—but even my later, conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge: in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.

I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the eighteen-hundreds, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century. “Monkey Eating Peaches,” “Man Fleeing a Burning Village,” “Peasant Woman Changing a Dirty Diaper”—how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor—sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers—but if I say their names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)

People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average pool table. I myself have no interest in pool, so why not take that money and spend it on something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.

The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came last year and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper—cute, even—but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than like anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw you coming.”

Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same—namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.

“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years not cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, and showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.

“That’s O.K.,” I said.

“Even if I were in prison, and this was the only thing on my wall, I wouldn’t waste my time with it. I’d look at my feet or at my mattress or whatever, but not at this, no way.”

I tried my best not to sound too hopeful. “Is someone sending you to prison?”

“No,” he said. “But whoever sold this to you should be there. I don’t know what you paid, but if it was more than ten dollars I think you could probably sue the guy for fraud.” He looked at it one last time, and then rubbed his eyes as if they’d been gassed. “God Almighty. What were you thinking?”

“If art is a matter of personal taste, why are you being so aggressive?” I asked.

“Because your taste stinks,” he told me. This led him to reflect upon “Cracked Man,” which still hangs in the foyer beside his living room. “It’s three slabs of clay cemented to a board, and not a day goes by when I don’t sit down and look at that thing,” he said. “I don’t mean glancing, but full-fledged staring. Contemplating, if you catch my drift.”

“I do,” I said.

He then described the piece to my boyfriend, Hugh, who had just returned from the grocery store. “It was done by a gal named Proctor. I’m sure you’ve heard of her.”

“Actually, no,” Hugh said.

My father repeated the name in his normal tone of voice. Then he began yelling it, and Hugh interrupted, saying, “Oh, right. I think I’ve read something about her.”

“You’re damn right you have,” my father said.

Before they started collecting art, my parents bought some pretty great things, the best being a concrete lawn ornament they picked up in the early nineteen-sixties. It’s a toadstool, maybe three feet tall, with a red spotted cap and a benevolent little troll relaxing at its base. My father placed it just beyond the patio in our back yard, and what struck my sisters and me then, and still does, is the troll’s expression of complete acceptance. Others might cry or get bent out of shape when their personal tastes are denounced and ridiculed, but not him. Icicles hanging off his beard, slugs cleaving to the tops of his pointed shoes: “Oh, well,” he seems to say. “These things happen.”

Even when we reached our teens, and developed a sense of irony, it never occurred to us to think of the troll as tacky. No one ever stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth, or disgraced him with sexual organs, the way we did with Mr. Balloon Man, or my mother’s Kitchen Witch. One by one, my sisters and I left home, and the back yard became a dumping ground. Snakes nested beneath broken bicycles and piles of unused building supplies, but on return visits we would each screw up our courage and step onto the patio for an audience with Mr. Toadstool. “You and that lawn ornament,” my mom would say. “Honest to God, you’d think you’d been raised in a trailer.”

Standing in her living room, surrounded by her art collection, my mother frequently warned us that death brought out the worst in people. “You kids might think you’re close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you’re left to divide up our property. Then you’ll see what savages you really are.”

My sisters and I had always imagined that, when the time came, we would calmly move through the house, putting our names on this or that. Lisa would get the dessert plates, Amy the mixer, and so on, without dissent. It was distressing, then, to discover that the one thing we all want is that toadstool. It’s a symbol of the people our parents used to be, and, more than anything in the house itself, it looks like art to us. When my father dies, I envision a mad dash through the front door, past the Hibel and the Bradlingtons, past “Cracked Man” and “Balloon Man” and into Indian territory, where we’ll push one another down the stairs, six connoisseurs, all with gray hair, charging toward a concrete toadstool.

Edna Hibel Art and Gifts.
Van der Pol.