Color Blind (4 page)

A
day off had done her good. Now Kate was anxious to get to Boyd Werther’s studio and complete the taped interview for the upcoming installment of
Artists’ Lives.
They would have to finish on time if she was to keep her appointment with Floyd Brown. Despite Clare Tapell’s assurance that all they wanted from her was an opinion on a couple of paintings, Kate was dreading it. Paintings in a gallery or museum were one thing, in a police station something else entirely.

Kate pushed the thought from her mind and quickened her step.

Mulberry Street felt like a small village waking up just a bit later than the rest of Manhattan: a few trucks and vans delivering wares; shopkeepers pulling open metal grates; window washers sloshing soapy water across glass storefronts; the mostly young, definitely hip residents—women with a strip of exposed gym-toned belly, guys sporting that just-out-of-bed tousled hair that needed an hour of gelling into shape—ambling into one or another of the cool new cafés that dotted the street, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their still young, but otherwise wise mouths. Kate wondered how they could afford the time. Were they artists, musicians, or out-of-work stockbrokers who’d opted for the boho life after the nineties market tumbled? Whatever. Good for them, thought Kate, always amazed when she came down to NoLIta, the area north of Little Italy, at how the city was such a canny chameleon, able to transform neighborhoods seemingly overnight.

Kate’s small PBS film crew was completely set up and ready to roll by the time she stepped out of the industrial elevator into Boyd Werther’s football field of a studio. With its twelve-foot pressed-tin ceilings, wide-plank floors, and glorious city views, Kate had kidded Boyd that he must have killed someone to have such a grand studio, but she knew better.

Boyd Werther was that rare art world phenomenon, an artist who had been successful throughout his career. First as a cool minimal painter in the seventies, and then, when he’d expanded his artwork and taken up where the abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s had left off, combining the energy and grace of de Kooning’s gesture with Mark Rothko’s gorgeous color, he had been canonized a “modern master”—his canvases of looping, intertwining color bands compared to such grand and disparate influences as Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings, the calligraphy of ancient Japanese scrolls, and the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux.

Lately, Kate kept hearing him referred to as the “great white hope.” She wasn’t sure if people meant Boyd was the keeper of the traditional flame or if it was some sort of put-down, but knowing the art world, Kate assumed the latter. No artist could be successful for forty years and not have people despise him.

Kate hoped Boyd Werther’s career was indeed as successful and lucrative as it appeared, since the artist had confided to her that he was currently paying alimony and child support to three—or was it four? Kate could not remember—ex-wives, who had provided him with six or seven offspring, including a toddler in a fancy private preschool—the product of his most recent divorce from a Brazilian beauty.

Kate stepped gingerly between strobe lights and wires to give each of her crew a quick hug.

“Where’s Boyd?” she asked.

“Moussing his hair,” said Cindy, rolling her eyes.

Kate unfolded her list of final questions for Boyd, whom she’d been interviewing for several weeks. This was the last day of filming and she wanted to make sure she had everything she needed for her show.

This season, Kate’s series was simple: Each week a different artist was interviewed about the importance of color. Though the interviews came across as live, they were taped so that Kate could not only edit out the mistakes, but add relevant historical footage, like Kandinsky’s pure lyrically colored abstract
Improvisations
of the early 1900s, Josef Albers’s intensive color studies, close-ups of impressionist paintings (so she could point out how those painters had optically created color by placing, say, a red beside a yellow to create the sensation of orange in the eye of the beholder), as well as interviews with scientists and color theorists.

Boyd Werther was not only a top-notch colorist, but articulate and entertaining, and Kate was confident she would have a terrific show.

While the TV crew finished setting up, Boyd Werther’s ever-present studio assistants—two extraordinarily pretty young women—were floating around the studio picking up brushes and paint rags, answering Boyd’s phone, making coffee. Kate assumed they attended to the genius’s whims and demands, artful or otherwise.

Boyd Werther strode into the room on bare feet, his studio floors kept clean enough to eat off by those nubile and nimble assistants.

A large man edging toward fat, Werther was decked out in a silky black shirt, half unbuttoned to display his bulky torso, and loose-fitting drawstring pants, cinched below an impressive belly. His hair was long, stylishly unkempt, once black, now streaked with gray. He took Kate’s hand, planted a dramatic kiss, then kissed both her cheeks. “Your eyes”—he pulled back and studied her—“are remarkably viridian. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“
Constantly.
The butcher, the man at the deli counter, everyone. It’s
so
annoying.”

Boyd laughed. “But it’s true. They are a pure viridian green. Quite startling.”

“Yeah, right,” said Kate. “And my hair is the most brilliant burnt sienna, and my lips are what—cadmium-red scarlet? And what else? I must be missing something.”

He drew his finger gently along her cheek. “Your skin. A perfect mix of rose madder with an undercoat of Naples yellow mixed with just a dollop of titanium white.”

“Oh, brother.” Kate rolled her viridian eyes.

Boyd offered up a sexy, confident smile, tugged gently on a thick chain he wore around his neck.

“Interesting shackle you’ve got there,” said Kate.

“This?” He ran his paint-stained fingers under it for better display. “A gift from my first wife. She was Italian, you know. An aristocrat. The piece had been in her family for centuries. Medieval, I believe.”

Kate came in for a closer look, admired the handicraft of the interlocking crosslike links. “How come she let you keep it?”

“I remain friends with all my ex-wives—and lovers.”

“Can we get started?” said the two cameramen practically in unison. They were obviously immune to the painter’s charms.

Kate gave herself a quick once over in one of Boyd’s floor-length mirrors, smoothed her slacks and sweater, and arranged herself in one of the two director’s chairs that had been set up in the middle of Boyd’s studio, with his enormous colorful canvases surrounding them.

The assistant clipped microphones onto Boyd and Kate, and for the next two hours the artist hardly took a breath, gesturing at his paintings, delivering opinions, and making pronouncements.

To her final question—“How important is color to you?”—Boyd said, “It’s
everything
. Absolutely everything. The reason I wake up in the morning. One only has to look at my paintings to see that. Really, why bother to paint if you’re not going to make use of color, art’s most seductive tool? I eat, sleep, and dream color.”

“Sounds unhealthy,” said Kate, then quick-turned to the cameramen and said, “Cut.” She shook her head. “Sorry, Boyd. I couldn’t resist. But let me respond to that more respectfully.” She nodded at the cameramen to roll again. “I see,” she said, more solemnly now. “So what would you say to painters who limit their palette, or use no color at all, simply black and white?”

“Well, Franz Kline got away with black-and-white paintings, but that was in the 1950s. Now, well, it would be a
big
bore. I could never do that. Never. The fact is,” said the artist with a nonchalant shrug, “I’d kill myself without color.”

“Could you say that again?” one of the cameramen asked. “I want to get a close-up.”

“Sure.” Boyd Werther sat up straighter in the director’s chair, smoothed his silky shirt as the camera dollied in.

“I’d absolutely
kill
myself if I was denied the use of color,” he said. “No question.”

B
y the way,” said Kate, as Boyd kissed her cheeks good-bye at the freight elevator. “A wise old artist once told me to never say never.”

“I imagine you’re referring to my statement about never working in black and white.”

“I just wouldn’t want you to kill yourself,” said Kate.

I
t had been over a year since Kate had been inside the drab tan walls of the Sixth Precinct, and nothing had changed—same fluorescent lighting washing everything in a sickly hue; same smell of bad coffee, perps’ lies, cops’ ambition, and dreams gone sour turning the air foul, her own bad memories adding to the mix, making it personal.

She nodded at the desk cop, who waved her through. “Brown’s waiting for you. You know the way?”

Oh, yes, she remembered.

K
ate stared at her hands, at the pearly, not quite clear, polish, and checked her watch.

“I don’t think I can do it, Floyd.” She pushed her thick hair behind her ears, took a deep breath. She’d already been through it with Clare Tapell, agreed she would take a look. But now that she was here, in Brown’s office, with nightmares of the Death Artist crowding everything else out of her psyche, she didn’t want any part of it. If Richard were here he’d be screaming NO WAY. But she hadn’t spoken to him since he’d called from his office and sounded upset, saying he’d tell her about it when he got back from taking depositions in Boston.

Brown drummed his nails along his desk. “Look, McKinnon, I understand, but it’s a favor to me and to Tapell.”

Kate nodded, knew she didn’t have much choice. But her mind was still fighting it. What the hell was she doing here, now, when she’d finally gotten her life back on track after a year of nightmares and mourning? She wanted to return to her TV series, or Let There Be a Future, to review applicants for the coming term, figure out how and where she was going to get the funds to support a new group of kids. The kind of problems she liked.

“Okay.” Kate stood, smoothed her slacks, tried to adjust her mind to the task. It was simple enough. Take a look at a couple of paintings. That much she could handle.

She looked into Brown’s dark eyes, and said: “Let’s get this over with.”

B
rown had the siren going, navigating his Chevy Impala through the Bronx streets like a cowboy.

“If you’d mentioned the Bronx I would have said no for sure.” Kate stared out the window at tenements and brown-stones that reminded her of the street she’d grown up on in Astoria, only shoddier.

“Yeah, I asked if some rookie wouldn’t like to personally carry the paintings up to your Park Ave castle, but hey, these days the NYPD is a little short on staff.”

“Funny,” said Kate with a slight sneer. “And it’s Central Park West. Not Park Avenue.”

“Yeah,” said Brown, smiling. “I know that.”

“Been a while since you had someone to abuse,
Detective
Brown?”

“No. But you were always more fun than most. And it’s
Chief
Brown.”

“Yeah,” said Kate, returning Brown’s sardonic smile. “I know that.”

T
he Bronx precinct looked a lot worse than the Sixth, even though it was obvious that efforts had been made on their behalfs. The paintings were set up in the precinct’s briefing room, with the permanent rows of metal chairs facing a blackboard and bulletin board, and a lectern with a microphone—where all the important meetings took place. There were large black clips attached to the edges of the plastic bags which held the unstretched paintings, pushpins stuck through them to hold them on to the bulletin board alongside the crime scene photos, also pushpinned, which Kate wished they had chosen to put elsewhere—preferably anywhere that she wasn’t.

McNally huffed his way into the room. “Sorry.” His face was flushed. “No one told me you were here.”

Brown made the introductions.

Kate could feel the Bronx chief looking her over, sizing her up. She knew people often assumed from her style and dress, the quality of her speech that she was a product of private-school, summer-home, Mercedes-Benz wealth, when in fact she was simply her own best invention.

On the desk beside the lectern someone had set out a coffee urn along with the ubiquitous stack of Styrofoam cups, Cremora, a dish strewn with packets of sugar and Sweet ’n Low. There were even cookies, Oreos, on a plastic plate.

Kate avoided looking at the crime scene photos, though they were busy imprinting on her brain via her peripheral vision.

But the paintings drew her in. Was it the fact that she’d been spending half her days for the past six months reading everything on color, from Josef Albers’s famous
Interaction of Color
to interviewing Ellsworth Kelly, to poring through Mondrian’s and Van Doesburg’s writings on primary color, even flying to Germany to chat with Gerhard Richter about his color-chart paintings—or was it simply that the color in these awkward paintings was so damn off that it was riveting all by itself? Kate wasn’t sure.

“What do you think?” McNally nibbled an Oreo.

Kate moved closer to the still life of fruit. “Well, you could call it
fauve
—the French painters who experimented with color, Matisse, Derain, Dufy—but I don’t think so.
Les fauves
—that’s French for wild beasts—were trying to structure a painting entirely through color. But this, well, there’s nothing connective about the color. It’s bold and garish, and certainly wild, but it doesn’t add up to anything.”

Brown leaned in. “So you think whoever painted it is an amateur?”

“Could be. Maybe he’s what the art world calls an
outsider
.”