The Art of Secrets (6 page)

On FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16, sitting in a behemoth leather chair in the principal's office,

Kendra Spoon, sophomore,

answers questions for an audience that includes the principal, the school attorney, and the newspaper reporter.

Am I in trouble?

Not at all. We just need some more information before we can let you move forward with this whole thing. We spoke to your brother, too, and a lot of people. So you brought in things to donate—even things that weren't technically yours?

Yeah, my family moves around a lot. We don't have, like, extra stuff to give away. And we have zero experience with fundraising. So if we wanted to contribute something, we had to, you know, be creative. The one thing we did know is that old junk sometimes could be valuable.

Good, and how did you know that?

On Division Street, not far from our apartment, there are a bunch of antique shops. Everything from cheap Victorian furniture to stacks of old magazines. You'd be amazed at what people will pay just because something's old. Get this, if you take the ugliest floor lamp from the tackiest trailer park from the 1970s, and wash it up, and put it in a shop window in a trendy neighborhood, you could probably get a hundred bucks for it. Seriously, I'm not kidding.

Wait—you donated items from antique shops?

No, from alleys! My brother said we should cruise around and see what we could find. Honestly, Kevin will come up with any excuse to get behind the wheel. He likes to drive the way other people like to breathe. He's weird about it. So we drove everywhere, from the Loop to Rogers Park. We spent whole Sundays just driving around, looking in alleys, climbing into gross dumpsters, and bringing stuff home.

So you two were driving around, hoping to find items to sell . . .

Right—plus, our mom had been
off the hook
, ranting about this auction idea, and sometimes, to be honest, we left home to get away from her and all that planning. We call her Monica the Mouth. It never stops moving.

And you guys did find some useful things for the auction.

We couldn't believe what we found! A cute wooden table and chairs, painted white, with red-stenciled flowers on the seats. We found that up in Rogers Park. Why would somebody throw them away? We found this elegant old piece of white marble, and a whole box of snow globes—totally random—and a cool, vintage ship-in-a-bottle thing. We donated it all.

And . . . well, obviously you found some artwork.

We found
tons
of paintings. People throw away a lot of art, especially, I guess, in neighborhoods where artists live, like Humboldt Park and Albany Park. Broken paintings, ripped paintings, but lots of them in good shape. I guess artists must sometimes finish a painting and not like it and not even want to
see
it anymore, so they throw it away. Or maybe it reminds them of an ex. So they throw it away. Or . . . maybe someone finds it in a closet when they move in, and they think it's ugly, so they throw it away. A lot of it, to be honest,
was
heinous. I don't mean to be rude. I am very pro artist and pro personal expression. Still, some artists must be color-blind. Not that I am prejudiced against the color-blind—

Kendra, if we may interrupt.

Sorry. I talk a lot when I'm nervous.

Don't be nervous. You're not in trouble. Where did you find . . . it?

Okay, um . . . we found
it
in a random alley, in Lincoln Park, close to DePaul's campus. In case you didn't know, college students throw out a ton of really useful stuff. But other than that, and we've said it over and over again, we can't remember which garage it was behind, or which house or building, or even which alley. We'd been everywhere. Like, I don't know, fifty different alleys.

Try, Kendra, please. Any details of that day will be helpful.

It's hard to remember specific details. All those days blend together . . . Let's see, the day was sunny . . . I mean, it was mid-October, right? So there were, like, leaves on the ground everywhere. We'd been cruising around all afternoon without much luck. We were about to give up for the day and go home. I was super hungry. I remember that! “
Food, food, food, food
,” I kept saying, because I wanted to bug Kevin to the point that he would take me somewhere for a sandwich or something. He was ignoring me. Anyway, he slowed the car when we noticed a big cardboard box, like the size you'd get a nice TV in. Not a flat-screen TV—like, old-school,
huge,
you know?

We've seen the box. Actually, we have the box.

Right, so I jumped out of the car and looked inside. It was filled with, like, books. Believe me, by now I was used to garbage. But these books smelled bad, like
boiled broccoli
bad. I would have left them. I told Kevin they stank. But he got out of the car. I was so annoyed, because I really wanted to go eat!

And?

And Kevin was like, “C'mon, some of these could be valuable.” He wanted to look through them. I'm telling you, my brother sticks with things until they're done perfectly
.
He's thorough and super patient, just like my mom. It's a good quality in most people, I guess, but not when you're
starving
and ready to
eat your
shoe
or something. So we picked up this dirty, smelly box and put it in the trunk. It weighed a ton, I remember that.

And you brought it straight to school?

No, I made Kevin take me home to eat. Actually, we left the box in the trunk of Kevin's car for a few days, because it was finals time and . . . whatever, we didn't have a chance to look through it. That's right! We were studying for exams. So that's
exactly
when we found it. The weekend before Quarter One finals. Is that helpful?

Maybe . . . So you took the box without asking anyone? You didn't knock on the door of the people who owned the house to see if—

That box was in an
alley
, with the
garbage
, and that made it fair game. The previous owners had abandoned everything inside that box, and it was ours for the taking. That's the way the world works, right? That's, like, the Law of the Alley. I mean, someone threw away that box of awesome
snow globes
, too, but nobody's asking about
those
.

True, but we're talking about something else, something valuable—

But nobody's claimed it, have they? Nobody called the police or the newspaper and said, “Hello, my art is missing!” You guys even put that story in the paper, but the people who called in were just nut jobs. They wanted the money—or the possibility of money—but they couldn't describe the art, or say where it came from, or say which alley they had left it in. They couldn't name any of the smelly old books it was found with. Nobody could prove ownership or show any paperwork or anything. Everybody knows that Kevin and I
found
it, fair and square. Nobody can prove anything different. You guys finally said it was ours, and so it is. That isn't up for debate. And nobody else has the right to tell us what to do with it. I feel really strongly about that.

Can I go back to class, please?

On TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, in a quiet art studio that stinks the way only a room that has been the scene of two weeks of carved-potato printing can stink,

Jean Delacroix, Department of Art,

welcomes the newspaper reporter to chat for a few minutes.

It's about time, right? Yes, well, thanks for arranging to come when we could really talk. I'm glad we could do this before the Thanksgiving break, at least.

Oh, you expected a woman. Based on my email? Well, it's French. I was born here in the States, as were both my parents, but my grandparents were French. Pronounced
Jean,
“John” rather than “Gene.” For example, like
Jean
Renoir or
Jean
-Luc Godard, the famous filmmakers. Or
Jean
Genet, the great author. All men.

All right, then? Moving forward. Thanks, I'm happy to talk about it. I'm eager to promote this. I'm even writing an article that I'd like to sell to
Art Forum
or
Smithsonian
or somewhere. After all, I was the first person to realize that the Spoons' “garbage art” was something special. The style of the work is unmistakable.

So here's what happened: As you may know, donated items for the fundraiser are being stored in the gym. The Monday before Halloween, I went to drop off a box of Wedgwood dessert plates I didn't need. And like everyone else, I was browsing to see if I might bid on anything on the big day.

I should add, I
wanted
to help with the fundraiser
.
Kevin Spoon is in my AP Studio Art class. Kevin's not a dumb jock. He's . . . sensitive, you know? He fully engages with whatever he's doing, and that focus and commitment are inspiring to the kids around him. It's rare. As a teacher, I appreciate that.

I don't know Saba Khan, but—I mean, you've got to feel bad for that family, no matter what people are saying. I realize when there's a shortage of suspects, the default mode is usually to blame the victims, but in this case it can't be right. This wasn't negligence or a gas space heater; this was arson.

Anyway, among other items, Kevin and his sister donated eight or ten of the most god-awful paintings I have ever seen. We're talking
bad
work—sloppy composition, poor use of color—worst of all, not interesting. And along with that junk, I saw this odd, oversize album of pages bound together with ordinary string. White butcher's string that had yellowed over time. There was a cardboard cover with no decoration at all. It looked like a child's old class report that should have been thrown out decades ago. The corners of the paper were fragile, brittle, some broken.

However,
on the inside, the illustrations were beautiful, a mix of heavy pencil and watercolor, these landscapes with figures, mostly girls, that you could tell had been traced, maybe from magazines. Old magazine advertisements, like from the nineteen forties. Extraordinary work.

My heart started to race and I felt dizzy. I'm not kidding, I nearly fainted. I actually took the pages and sat on the gym floor to look at them.

You haven't seen it yet? Well, it's here at school. You should go look. There are ten pages total, bound together with the string. The pages depict a coherent story—a troubling story, definitely, but coherent.

Basically, on the first page, you've got these two blond girls in flowered sundresses and they're playing in a park. The girls have a big ball, like a beach ball, with stripes and rows of stars. The park is lush, intensely green, with these gigantic flowers and a few odd creatures: enormous butterflies, a yellow dog with orange horns, a snake with the head of a little pink kitten . . . The details are surreal, you understand? No, not like Dr. Seuss. It's darker, more textured, very much the style of an earlier era.

Then you turn the page, and five men appear. They look almost like Civil War soldiers, wearing gray uniforms and amusing gray caps with feathers. They have serious faces, angry dark eyes, and they carry rifles.

Turn the page again, and there's a battle between these two groups. It's extremely violent—pages of gruesomeness. The girls stripped naked, wounded, bloody stuff. A few more girls come to the rescue and join in. The final pages are filled with gray explosions and brilliant, vivid fire. In the end, this delicate girl army somehow manages to defeat the five soldiers. The girls stand victorious on top of the lifeless pile of men, and they all hold hands in a circle—I mean, like some bizarre Brownie troop.

To me, this was immediately identifiable as the work of Henry Darger, a Chicago artist who died in the early nineteen seventies. The fascinating thing about Darger is that he lived and worked in complete isolation. He was a hermit. If you saw him on the street, you might have thought he was homeless.

He worked menial jobs his whole life—janitor, dishwasher—and lived alone in a cheap rented apartment in Lincoln Park. In fact, probably not far from where the Spoons found the box of books. Darger never sold any art during his lifetime, or even tried to. It wasn't until after he died that his landlord discovered what Darger had left behind. His very modest living space was filled with this obsessive writing and brilliant artwork. And just like that, Darger's unique vision was revealed to the world. It's one of the great stories of twentieth-century art.

Oh, and one other thing. In this series of images, once the girls are unclothed—how shall I put this?—well, it's no longer clear they're
girls
, anatomically speaking. For me, this sealed the deal. Gender ambiguity: classic Darger.

Sitting there on the gym floor, I realized I was holding a potential art treasure.

First thing I did, I got to my feet and called the principal to the gym. I showed her the paintings and told her what I suspected. Dr. Stickman looked through the album slowly, her nose a bit wrinkled. The pages are really
dirty
. Not pornographic, of course, but dirty as in
grimy
after decades of dust, soot, and neglect. God only knows where they've been these past seventy or eighty years.
Not
displayed. The colors are as bright as the day they were painted.

When I told Dr. Stickman that the album might be worth an enormous sum of money, her whole expression changed. I saw her eyebrows lift slightly and—off the record?—I could tell those gears were working. Her lips crept into a smile, and she wanted to know how
much
money I guessed it would fetch “at a real auction.” I told her I honestly didn't know.

Next, the two of us called those Spoon kids to the gym. We had to find out where this artwork had come from. But the kids both seemed doubtful.

“
Th
at
is worth something?” Kevin asked. “Those watercolors?”

“The naked girls?” Kendra said. “With the little, uh,
things
?”

Regina was clutching the album, white knuckles and everything, so I said something like, “Kids, this money could change your lives.”

“But I mean, there's no signature anywhere,” Kevin said, still not believing. “Is there a name on any of the pages?”

“There wouldn't be,” I told him. “Darger didn't sign his work, because he didn't expect anyone to see it. He was an extremely private guy.”

Finally Kendra Spoon seemed to get it. Her face broke into this huge smile and she said, “But this is amazing! If this artwork really is valuable, and we sell it . . . think how much money we'll make for the Khans!”

Unbelievable, right? She was still thinking of the
Khans.
Remarkable generosity.

I should be clear: I am not an art historian and I'm certainly no Darger expert. But I've seen his work in galleries many times. The art community in Chicago really worships him. And once you've seen that work—I mean, you cannot forget it. Seeing Darger's work is like getting a vivid, specific look into the subconscious mind of this other person, a look into Darger's own
dreams.

I'll say it again, I'm not an expert. Actually, my field is fiber arts. Look, those are mine, hanging on the wall there. Thanks. No, I don't like that term. “Quilt maker.” To me, it sounds feminine, rural, and unsophisticated. Please, I am a male fiber artist, I work with textiles, and I live in the city.

And let me tell you something, between you and me. I'm not altruistic like the Spoons. I should have kept my mouth shut and let this Darger work go unnoticed in the gym. I could have waited a month or so, bid on the piece at the auction, and probably gotten it for ten bucks. Then I could have sold it myself and moved to Paris . . . where, trust me, there are plenty of other men named
Jean
. Forget teaching watercolor technique and papier-mâché to a roomful of distracted teenagers. I could be working full-time as an artist. That's been my dream my whole life. Here I had an easy opportunity to make that happen, and I blew it.

Listen, if you ever get tired of the newspaper business, you could write a damn good book about my life. Maybe call it Portrait of an Idiot.