Excerpt
White Lead
Chapter 1
“Night, Calvin.”
“Night, Stella. Don’t work too late.” He made a kissing sound with his lips and jerked his head to the left. “I’m done in. I’m going home when I finish this floor.” On security-camera footage you could see the woman in red platform shoes—that’s yours truly—and the night cleaner in his blue uniform laugh silently and in complicity. We both heard sounds of strangled breathing coming from one of the rooms along the corridor.
“You going to see what that noise is?” I asked.
“Nah. I’m tired of that show.”
Calvin went on his way, mopping inlaid marble floors whose black-and-white geometric pattern looked as if it would cut your feet if you walked barefoot. Blue cleaning-fluid bottle stuck in his back pocket, he made his way from office to office, turning lights on, then turning them off when he’d finished. I leaned at an angle so I could see Calvin’s retreating back through the double glass doors. At this hour, in the middle of the night, I was usually alone on the floor, but not always.
I liked working at night, when, as the hours ticked by, fewer and fewer people occupied the building, until I was alone in the complex—or so I liked to imagine. In terms of my work, natural light is both a blessing and a curse. It illuminates, fades, and degrades color simultaneously, so there are times when it seems worthwhile to avoid it.
The Rothkos at the Fogg Museum were destroyed by sunlight, only to be restored by computer-generated projections decades later. Turn off those neutered artificial lights, though, and all that will ever remain is the six damaged canvases. My employer didn’t keep track of my hours, as long as the work got done. Claiborne’s Auction House was the oldest in the country, yet it had a reputation similar to a Swiss bank’s in terms of privacy and discretion.
Evening auctions were invitation-only black-tie affairs with limited-edition expensive catalogs that themselves became valuable collector’s items. An evening of painting sales alone could net higher than the gross national product of Iceland. The bidders and their proxies dwelled in the society pages, but for me this was another continent, one I tried not to think about. Deals were sealed with handshakes, not paper or traceable electronic contracts, and no one blinked at cash transactions, however large the amounts. And sometimes these amounts were very large. The directors, the curators, all the way down to the art conservators like myself, didn’t ask too many questions about the provenance of the valuables that passed through their hands. The business end had nothing to do with me. Or so I thought.
I worked on paintings, had huge student loans to pay off, and couldn’t afford to ruffle any feathers. Did I check that Warhol against the Stolen Art Database or against Interpol’s database? No. I was more concerned with removing the streak of grease barely visible above Marilyn Monroe’s cerulean eyebrow without damaging the pigment underneath. If she acquired the dirt in the trunk of a thief’s Chevy Volt, that wasn’t my concern. Dirt, oil, ink, paint—for me, it’s all molecules and chemistry. Chemistry I had studied in college, even if I doodled in class, drawing faces on the diagrams of atoms found in my textbooks. I attended labs and exams in thermodynamics and ion formation until I met Carter, a boy with a blue Mohawk, green on the sides; he looked like a parrot. Carter was a painter, a committed do-it-yourselfer. Obsessed with going back to the origin of things, he made his own paint. I was easily seduced by his formulas—grinding copper sulfate, say, with cobalt, heating, cooling, scraping, mixing with egg and linseed oil to create brilliant colors. He had a sideline making reproductions for museum gift shops and another sideline I preferred not to know about, in which he thought my knowledge of chemistry would be a valuable asset. Mr. Invent the Wheel left me for a girl who worked in wearable technology, and I began to train at the Art Institute of Chicago. I had a few jobs here and there, then Claiborne’s recruited me, a talented novice, and I was happy to leave the sadness and gales that blew off Lake Michigan for New York. Last I heard, my ex-boyfriend was learning code.
Claiborne’s wasn’t as impressive as working in a museum. It was a business that profited from moving objects around the world, but I was pretty much left alone in my studio lab, so I tried to keep my distance from the transactions that occurred on the floors below. During the day men and women in tailored suits ushered in buyers and their representatives, but the first-floor halls were soundproof, so I never heard the cries of the famed auctioneers. Upstairs in the offices and studios, there was no soundproofing. My lab was a cluster of tables and surfaces that I tried to keep free of clutter, shelves of paint and pigment, microscopes, a spectrograph, an X-ray machine in an annex off to one side; reproductions of pictures I’d worked on, or just admired, shingled the walls.
I dumped my coffee cup into a mid-century trash can.
“I hope that was empty,” Calvin said, looking annoyed. Cleaning the assorted fluids that leaked through cheap plastic trash liners came with the job, but he wasn’t happy about it. “You’d think with all the money in this place they could buy decent trash bags.”
“It was empty. I wouldn’t do that to you, Cal.”
Muffled choking and a kind of gurgling noise pierced the walls, but the rasping threads of a voice didn’t sound much like distress, more like heavy breathing. Calvin had worked at the house for years, but when we stopped in the hall to talk he didn’t make more than a passing reference to the screech. To tell you the truth, there was no need to. We both knew where the sound was coming from and what it was. The noises grew slightly in pitch. The squeals, or whatever they were, turned puzzling in their combination of pleasure and distress. It was nearly eleven o’clock, but I still had work to do. A condition report was due on Las Meninas, which had just arrived from the Prado. The Velázquez was the rarest picture I had ever worked on directly, and it was a big painting, one that would require hours of scrutiny.
Las Meninas was partly a self-portrait of Diego Velázquez painting the Spanish royal family in 1656. The painter himself stood at his easel on the left side of the painting; the small blond princess Infanta Margarita, in a white dress, stood in the center, surrounded by her maids and her dwarf. Her parents, King Philip and Queen Mariana, were reflected in a mirror in the background. You might imagine they stood where the viewer now stands, watching Velázquez paint their daughter and her entourage. That’s what it looks like at first. Then you realize, because of where the Infanta is standing, that Velázquez isn’t painting her. He couldn’t be. She’s standing only slightly in front of him, almost beside him. The huge canvas he stands before could be a portrait of her parents, invisible, located in front of the easel (as you, the viewer, are). They are reflected in the mirror behind the figures in the foreground. The Infanta’s white dress is large and luminous. The maids clustered around her, rapt with expressions of concern and attention, are dressed in white and blue. The dwarf, Maribola, looks straight at me, or, presumably, at the king and the queen. Hair long, square-jawed, she doesn’t bow or kneel as the others do. I think her expression is almost defiant, and she fascinates me far more than the others. As a conservator, I have to treat all the figures equally. Dog fur, velvet sleeves, the flecks in Velázquez’s iris—all are leveled, all deserve the same search for flaws, fading, degraded pigment, and the same remedy if needed.
There are a lot of stories in this painting, and visually they are at odds with one another. Las Meninas translates as “The Maids of Honor” so is it not even about the royal family in the first place? Is it a subversive portrait of the help? For the artist, even including himself, as if photobombing royalty, was an in-your-face act. But shouldn’t the mirror include the back of the painter’s head? Some analysts believe the reflection is of the royal couple as they appear in Velázquez’s easel painting, not because they’re standing where the viewer is. If so, this is all the more reason for Velázquez to appear in the mirror. The whole painting is a puzzle that people have spent lifetimes studying. I had only a few days.
Las Meninas is dark, in the sense that the only light seems to come from a window to the right, opposite Velázquez, as he paints. But, also, the use of lead paint, in a painting this old, causes the entire surface to darken over time. You think these images— Rembrandts, Vermeers, Caravaggios—will be around forever, but they may not have much time left. I planned to test the paint and the varnish Velázquez used to determine which modern counterparts could be introduced if necessary.
I was intimidated by the responsibility of conserving this painting. My boss, the curator of European Painting, Jack Ashby, always praised my work, but despite his endorsement I couldn’t help wondering, Why me? I’d once worked on a painting attributed to the Rembrandt School, but that was about it. When a painting is this old, the paint darkens. Sometimes old paint has pulverized into a fine dust and it’s impossible to reapply. You study art history, you think these things are going to be around forever, but as objects they can be in their last chapter and that’s it. The pigments were never chemically stable to begin with. This is headache art, and there are older, more experienced conservators, who’ve studied this stuff their entire lives. I wasn’t one of them. Also, why fly a priceless painting across an ocean when any number of things could go disastrously wrong? Was I the only one with visions of the painting at the bottom of the ocean? It was one of the treasures of the Prado Museum and not in any way scheduled to be auctioned off. So what was it doing here in a New York auction house? But, as I said, I didn’t ask questions. I thought of them, but I didn’t ask.
