Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler

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СКАЧАТЬ them. Therese Jelencko, Allan’s teenage nanny and piano teacher, went with them:

      “Among my parents’ most intimate friends at the turn of the century were Michael and Sally Stein. I was a so-called child prodigy but hadn’t a good piano. So it was arranged that I practiced on their Steinway every morning. Their little son, Allan, four or five years of age, began to study with me. And a celebrated musician of the time, Oscar Weil, heard him play and was so enthusiastic that he begged to give him theory and harmony lessons and congratulated his parents on choosing ‘such a marvelous teacher,’ etc. I didn’t realize then what a compliment it was, but the Steins made up their minds that when they went to Europe they couldn’t dream of going without me. Of course I was then all of about fifteen years old, fifteen or sixteen.

      “This was my first trip to Europe. Actually I never expected to be able to get to Europe, certainly not at that age, and there was great excitement. I left with Mike and Sally Stein and their little boy in December 1903, and arrived at Cherbourg and was met by Mr. Stein’s younger sister and brother, Leo and Gertrude Stein. No, Gertrude wasn’t along; I’m mistaken there. It was just Leo. We actually arrived at Cherbourg about three o’clock in the morning, and I was thrilled and fascinated. I knew no French but was absolutely charmed. Leo took us to the old hotel; oh, dear, I’ve forgotten the name of it. The Hotel Fayot. It was the famous hotel in the Latin Quarter, facing the Luxembourg Gardens, where the Senators have their lunch; it was celebrated for its great restaurant. And that was an exciting night. I don’t think anybody slept a wink.

      “We finally found an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, 1 rue de Fleurus, which was the same street as Leo and Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus. I remember ours was an apartment three flights up. There was no such thing as an elevator, and of course it had no bath. We had to go up the street to Gertrude’s. They had a bath and were unique. I think in the whole street perhaps there was only one other bath. And the baths used to come around by cart. Pipes would be hoisted from the street into your apartment, the tin tub having been brought up ahead of time. And you ‘bought’ a bath, as it were. It was all very primitive and very exciting and very wonderful to me.

      “The Michael Steins moved to the rue Madame, I think it was 58 rue Madame, and part of my duties as an assistant in the household was to take the little boy to school. I’m going back a couple of years. I’m going back a couple of years. He went to a private school a few blocks away. And each morning I would meet Degas, the painter, who lived a block away, and each morning he’d ask how my little boy was. Well, I was only ten years older than Allan, but just the same I never corrected him. I was very proud of him, this very handsome young boy. Degas was an interesting figure and must have been at the height of his painting career then. I was just stupid enough to be really only interested in music. Well, it’s hard to follow in detail. There’s so much detail.”

      The last days of March, all crazy with cold weather, swooped and shifted around me like the torn, blown pages of an old book. My forced holiday had brought new pleasures, but it had also robbed me of any enduring structure. I woke most mornings to nothing. For six years there had been some necessity to getting up. The stack of marked exams, toast in a paper napkin, plus my leather satchel stuffed with books and what-have-you (torn from their nooks as I rushed to the door), and my head full of plans and anticipation for the children and the day, I had to catch one of those monstrous buses that filled our streets by seven just to make it to school before the concierge, with his paw full of keys, locked the great iron door shut for the morning. Those were sweet, rapid mornings, full of flight and arrival. They loomed behind me like the shimmering, silvery peaks that frame our city’s portrait, east and west: a magical, distant place—entirely unreachable. Now I was idle. I saw Dogan when he could arrange it. We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times. Twice we saw movies. I barely noticed the films, pinioned as I was to the minutest changes in his posture. I could never phone him. Lurking near the soccer field was out of the question, so I saw him less and less. The weather was terrible for a few weeks, and I stayed home and read. Herbert kept me supplied with books. It was an awful time, more destabilizing than I had then realized, and Herbert was my only reliable anchor.

      On the last Friday of that disappointing March, Herbert called from work to invite me for dinner at the Hotel Grand. He’d made some great discovery about the Steins and wanted to share it over a meal with me and our friend Henry Richard. Henry always stayed at the Grand (a squat brick and glass monstrosity that rose from the edge of our “historic district” like a staging area for some kind of theme-park ride). Henry was in town just now, buying art.

      Herbert, who really is extremely good at what he does, had discovered three “missing” drawings by Picasso—studies, he believed, for the 1906 painting called Boy Leading a Horse. (An utterly enchanting boy, standing nude beside a horse, which he seems to command without reins; the earth is tawny and burnished like the boy, while the sky is a festering storm of silver and gray, like the horse.) Herbert believed this boy might be Allan Stein. He’d uncovered a bill of lading sent by Allan to Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore in 1951, listing a portrait Picasso had painted of Allan, age eleven, during the same months that he painted Boy Leading a Horse—included with it were “three preliminary drawings.” The portrait arrived in America, but the drawings did not. Herbert thought these drawings might have been for Boy Leading a Horse. If Allan had posed one afternoon, during his sittings at Picasso’s studio, standing nude in the posture of the boy, he might, in some small way, be the Boy Leading a Horse. Finding the drawings could provide the link.

      “Obviously nothing can be proven per se.” Herbert rambled on as we sat waiting for Henry at the Grand. “Given Picasso’s use of—well, virtually anything he could get his hands on to make his paintings, no one could prove Allan was the model in any conventional sense. But it’s just so tantalizing to think of finding ‘the boy,’ I mean, a real boy stuck somewhere in that painting. It’s a monumental piece.” Herbert showed me a once-tipped-in color plate he’d cut from a book at the museum. The painting was very erotic. The contours of the boy’s belly and chest were supple and inviting. “Any evidence linking it to Allan Stein would be, you know, more than delightful. No one ever mentions him in this regard.” Henry arrived now, but that didn’t keep Herbert from going on. “Everyone’s so ga-ga about Cézanne’s Bathers, Greek kouroi, or this weird grown-up Parisian delinquent who I’m sure was very important and blah-blah-blah, but why never a real boy?” I smiled hello to Henry, who looked very smart in his linen jacket. “Why wouldn’t Picasso look at an actual boy?”

      Henry Richard, first name English last name French (Herbert simply called him “the Day-Glo king” [Henry made a fortune with a 1961 patent on psychedelic poster paints {the patent was his even if the idea wasn’t—his brilliant, druggy college roommate stumbled across it fooling around in chem lab, Henry saw the $$$ and offered the friend pot (to his credit a lot of pot) for the rights—and he licensed it out to manufacturers} without ever owning or running anything more than a postage meter at home] though Herbert only ever said this to me, not Henry), had spent the day with Herbert buying art. He liked to be called “Hank.”

      Hank bought art with Herbert’s advice, while also buying Herbert’s advice with art. The payoff for these friendly consultations was paintings, given to Herbert by the artists he pitched to the Day-Glo king (at that time building a fantastically high-profile collection)—a little thank-you for making their rent and maybe their careers. It all gets very complicated when Herbert later curates shows featuring these same artists, borrowing from the collections of the dozen industrialists he has advised in the past and writing lavish essays that create great reputations and markets for everyone involved: the artists, the collectors who own them, and not coincidentally Herbert, who just happens to have pieces by every last one of them, tossed his way free like a bone to a good dog who, in the last reel, turns out to have been the star of the movie all along.

      Hank snagged the waiter, and we ordered more drinks. Herbert handed me a photograph of the Steins, winter 1905. It was enchanting. The family is standing СКАЧАТЬ