"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

bragging slug ...
And all the time, a big part of my mind was wandering around in circles. It just
proved, I kept saying to myself, that you need the perspective of history to properly
evaluate anything in art. You think of all the men who were big guns in their time and
today are forgotten, that contemporary of Beethoven 's, for example, who, while he
was alive, was considered much the greater man, and whose name is known today
only to musicologists. But stillтАФ
Mr. Glescu glanced at the forefinger of his right hand where a little black dot
constantly expanded and con-tracted. "My time is getting short," he said. "And while
it is an ineffable, overwhelming delight for me to be stand-ing in your studio, Mr.
Mathaway, and looking at you at last in the flesh, I wonder if you would mind
obliging me with a small favor?"
"Sure," Morniel nodded, getting up. "You name it. Nothing's too good for you.
What do you want?"
Mr. Glescu swallowed as if he were about to bring himself to knock on the gates
of Paradise. "I wonderтАФI'm sure you don't mindтАФcould you possibly let me look
at the painting you 're working on at the moment? The idea of seeing a Mathaway in
an unfinished state, with the paint still wet upon itтАФ " He shut his eyes, as if he couldn
'
t believe that all this was really happening to him.
Morniel gestured urbanely and strode to his easel. He pulled the tarp off. "I intend
to call thisтАФ " and his voice had grown as oily as the subsoil of TexasтАФ "Figured
Figurines No. 29. "
Slowly, tastingly, Mr. Glescu opened his eyes and leaned forward. "ButтАФ " he
said, after a long silence. "Surely this isn't your work, Mr. Mathaway?"
Morniel turned around in surprise and considered the painting. "It 's my work, all
right. Figured Figurines No. 29. Recognize it?"
"
No, " said Mr. Glescu. "I do not recognize it. And that is a fact for which I am
extremely grateful. Could I see something else, please? Something a little later?"
"That 's the latest, " Morniel told him a little uncer-tainly. "Everything else is earlier.
Here, you might like this. " He pulled a painting out of the rack. "I call this Figured
Figurines No. 22. I think it's the best of my early period. "
Mr. Glescu shuddered. "It looks like smears of paint on top of other smears of
paint."
"Right! Only I call it smudge-on-smudge. But you probably know all that, being
such an authority on me. And here 's Figured Figurines No. тАФ"
"
Do you mind leaving theseтАФthese figurines, Mr. Mathaway? " Glescu begged. "I 'd
like to see something of yours with color. With color and with form!"
Morniel scratched his head. "I haven 't done any real color work for a long time.
Oh, wait!" he brightened and began to search in the back of the rack. He came out
with an old canvas. "This is one of the few examples of my mauve-and-mottled
period that I've kept."
"I can 't imagine why, " Mr. Glescu murmured, mostly to himself. "It 's positivelyтАФ "
He brought his shoulders up to his ears in the kind of shrug that anyone who's ever
seen an art critic in action can immediately recognize. You don 't need words after
that shrug; if you 're a painter whose work he's looking at, you don't want words.
About this time, Morniel began pulling paintings out frantically. He'd show them to
Glescu, who would gurgle as if he were forcing down a retch, and pull out some