"Reclining Figure, 1933"

By Jonah Goldberg

There sat the Savant Garde. They sat at the table and divined Great Thoughts.

“Landscapes and geological formations suggest permanence and timelessness,” said Degarde, her eyes still closed. Her elbows propped up her chin, and, as her acrylic nails drummed against her cheekbones, the horse silhouette ornately painted on each one created a zoetrope that galloped across her face.

Across the white conference table, Kirgenot’s eyes lit up. She pushed her box braids behind her; each strand was dyed a different color on a blue-green spectrum, and the movement sent a Mediterranean ocean wave crashing over her shoulder.

“Three substantial masses  — connectors activate the open space,” Kirgenot suggested, talking a mile per minute. “The inevitable anticipation of revelatory exaltation.” 

Degarde opened her eyes. Her contact lenses were stained glass designs she had made from the scales of butterfly wings, and they added lightyears of depth to her gaze. “Tell me more,” she all but whispered. There were sixteen members of the Savant Garde, all gathered together, but Kirgenot couldn’t help but feel that everyone else had disappeared. 

Kirgenot explained, “Solace in the hollows between solid forms—”

“Well of course, you’d need to consider the absence of a definitive setting—”

Suddenly everyone was talking at once, some building on Degarde’s foundation while most others wanted to shift the focus to their own new ideas.

“Why not cast a testament in tapestry — impermanence highlighting and fragmenting the figures?” Sapirse said. His blonde beard was crocheted into a clay-stained apron that reached his knees. As he spoke, his thick, callused hands made wide gestures, changing the shape of his cat’s cradle between his fingers to model the scene he desired to depict. The empty white walls and white ceiling of the exhibition space always made the room feel infinitely large to Kirgenot, but Sapirse was happy to take up all the space when he spoke. “Imbuing the fixed composite with a fleeting glimpse of eternity in its pensive juxtaposition.”

Sapirse’s gaze flickered now and again to the empty white statue stand. It had been ten weeks since he had last been chosen to be an artist-in-residence, Kirgenot recalled. He needed it; his ego needed it and his hands needed it even more — his fingers kept flicking back, wanting more freedom of movement to control the strings looping between his fingers.

But Degarde wanted the position just as badly. And her idea had enraptured everyone. When the Savant Garde put it to a vote, twelve hands pointed at Degarde. “You will be entirely liberated from the traditional constraints of figurative representation,” they spoke in harmony. Degarde stood and gave a small bow. Then she pointed at Kirgenot, selecting her as a vice.

Two doors exited the cubic exhibition space. One was eight feet tall; the other was thirty feet tall and thirty feet wide. At once, the fourteen other artists descended through the smaller opening. They would return to their day jobs—as curators, teachers, the luckiest among them full-time artists, and reconvene next week. Since joining the Savant Garde, Kirgenot had always exited with them. But now she and Degarde, artists-in-residence, engaged the larger door. Their first footsteps into the workshop set off a deep echo, and Kirgenot felt the exhibition space shrink to a birdhouse behind them. Then Degarde let go of the door, and it boomed closed behind them, locking them in for the week.

“Entirely liberated from the traditional constraints of figurative representation,” Degarde repeated cheerily, and squeezed Kirgenot’s hand.

___

They hammered away at bronze, heavy hits followed by light contours and corrections.

“The variegated surface of color,” Kirgenot considered.

Degarde nodded slowly. “The evocative backdrop of transience.”

Kirgenot put down her tools. She paced the creaking wood floor for several long minutes, her fingers absentmindedly tapping a waltz. The workshop gave strength even to this unintentional creative act; she found her other hand taking up a recapitulation of the same melody in common time, the final movement of a sonatina. She knew suddenly that, if she wanted it, the workshop would give her more hands with which to flesh out the rhythm. And then she understood Sapirse’s desperation — she could picture his hands in the workshop, his pent-up knuckles finally bending backward, letting him make impossible string designs.

She watched Degarde, whose mosaic eyes narrowed in frustration. Degarde had dented a cavity too deep. Now she hammered in inverse, drawing out the bronze to refill the fossa. Concentration is a form of love, Kirgenot’s first art teacher had told her. She could see that clearly as she studied Degarde’s movements, in the way that the other woman took in a quick breath and held it before every swing.

The idea came crashing like a tornado touching down on the roof of Kirgenot’s mind. A butterfly cannot take flight in rain. Even the lightest, most innocent being may find itself weighed down by the sky.  “The Decalcomaniac.”

Degarde stopped mid-stroke, eyeing her sculpture as if to see if it would answer to the name. Then she slapped her hands against the table, stood up, and wrapped Kirgenot in a bear hug. “The Decalcomaniac!”

Kirgenot held the hug as long as she could; she needed extra time to bring down the redness in her face. It was almost overwhelming, in the massive workshop, to suddenly be so close to Degarde.

___

Since the breakthrough, the artists had not slept or eaten in four days. Degarde had mentioned that this was typical, when Kirgenot had first asked where she could find some water. But now the pair, glistening with the dew of their labor, were taking a break, sitting on opposite sides of a bench and bouncing a clay ball between them. They had not come close to touching since the hug. Kirgenot tried to come at her confession indirectly.

“Beneath the interplay of light and shadow,” she began, “each stroke seems to pulse with vitality.” 

“The immensity of transition is central to the sculpture’s intricacy,” Degarde nodded. She backpedaled when she saw Kirgenot’s face fall. “A relatively new interplay of two symbols?”

Kirgenot turned her head down and let her braided sea swallow her, and then pour out of her. “Based on an earlier collage of biomorphic fragments… they present an image of abstracted forms interlocked across the surface of the canvas. The hard-edged organic shapes, rendered primarily with flat secondary hues, are set against this illusion of symmetry…” her voice had trailed off to a whisper, and she took a deep breath to bring the volume back up, “What I’m trying to say is… for me… we waver between being purely formal elements and alluding to organic entities.”

She waited, seeing nothing between her own hair and the hollow, effervescent lights of the workshop. After an agonizing minute, she heard the rustling of Degarde’s smock as she dusted her hands against her lap, stood, took the three echoing steps to close the distance between them, and put her hand on Kirgenot’s shoulder. Kirgenot wanted to put her own hand on top, to keep Degarde there. She clenched her fists instead.

“Put it into the work,” Degarde said gently. Kirgenot chose to be optimistic, since Degarde’s tone had neither closed nor opened that door, that option of We can talk about this after.

Kirgenot heeded the lead artist’s request. The unified body that they had been sculpting created distance from parts of itself, with only tenuous metal threads connecting the head, torso, and legs. But Degarde expressed it felt too separated. And so, after a day of internal wrestling, Kirgenot polished the cavity where a heart would be, and added a circulatory system of aqueducts that spread outward from this empty center, pulling the body together despite its apparent pain. 

The sculpture tossed and turned with the artists, on the last night before the exhibition, unslept and unsleeping.

___

The Savant Garde hauled open the workshop door. The two artists-in-residence walked out on either side. They presented their piece: the bronze figure of a woman, its featureless head blobbing into its neck, holding and balancing its pain like a tray of hors d'oeuvres. It reclined loudly, lying sideways propped on one wedge arm. That tired posture screamed out a desperation, a want.

“The Decalcomaniac,” Degarde announced. And before the workshop door closed, she turned, chisel in hand, to Kirgenot, and looked her vice in the eye. Kirgenot grimaced, then let it relax into a smile. She agreed with Degarde’s vision, with what the sculpture needed to become Art.

“Love,” Kigernot whispered. And then she and Degarde spoke together. “And at the end of Love, Form.” Degarde plunged the chisel into Kirgenot’s chest and lifted out her heart, placing it in the hollow ribs of the sculpture.

The sculpture took on new radiance, and cerulean water flowed through the veins Kirgenot had carved, so intricately, that the moving water vibrated the bronze body to hum. The movement highlighted the small dents forming the barest outline of a face, a longing gaze. 

The other members of the Savant Garde applauded. The noise eventually died down. The workshop door swung shut, and Kirgenot’s corpse stumbled to the floor. The collective began to brainstorm Great Thoughts for the next week’s masterpiece.