The Masterpiece of Gabin Lemaire

We were foolish to think Paris would hold us. At the first sound of chains being cut at the gate, I jerked upright. Gabin was smeared in red clay and ash, thrashing across the canvas with an artist’s exertion, somewhere between running a marathon and having an orgasm. He recoiled from his trance and swayed with angelic beauty. His bare chest rose and fell, and he staggered away from the canvas that towered above him. The studio was in disarray. Candles flickered in a staccato across the floor like a Catholic altar, and I crawled among them to snuff them out as Gabin kicked the articles of his craft under 16th Century tables. He dumped oils and charcoals down the neck of an ancient Roman wine amphora as he swore in his native French. Both of us considered hiding, hoping against hope that Rembrandt and Caravaggio might have stretched the canvas far enough to conceal us.

Gabin had another idea. Grabbing one of the charcoals rolling across the floor, and calling the Nazis everything but, he scrawled his name across the bottom of the canvas. He extended it to me with wild eyes and I took it, quickly marking my own initials timidly beside his. And then he kissed me. He was briny and damp with sweat and smelled of the dank red clay. He tousled my hair as the sharp, precise vernacular of the Germans began to echo through the anterooms.

He had just propped our colossal, beastly creation against a wall of old masters when the sound of boots echoed, and the beams of German torches illuminated the storeroom. Gabin hissed for me to run, but it was too late for that. The storeroom of La Galerie Cardoze was a dead-end, hidden from the gallery’s main spaces by a series of doors. Had we attempted escape, it would have been a maze of ancient relics blocking the natural means of egress, and now the Third Reich. 

It’s hard to say who was more astonished that pleasant evening in July: we two steel-minded youths caught in an artistic passion, or the Germans, coming to loot the French Jews of their collections by moonlight only to find something very much resembling a satanic ritual in the bowels of a gallery less than halfway down their list.

A slender officer, seemingly in charge, called out with a harsh inflection, directing his beam of light on our expectant faces—still too vain and ignorant in those days to be afraid. A prudish aide came alongside him and translated the German into a still foreign French. But Gabin understood.

“They want our papers,” he relayed in annoyance. As if these German officers were agitated policemen about to write us up for poor parking. The slender officer and his translator stared us down, hands on their firearms while the others began to work in a calculated manner, flipping over masterpieces to chalk them with letters and numbers based on composition. They didn’t look like the Nazis from the news reels. The translator wore a wool suit with spectacles. I could count four uniforms while the others I wouldn’t have blinked twice at on the street.  

They barked for our papers again, and I leapt for the little canvas sack that contained our shared worldly possessions. I offered them my passport and Gabin’s carte d’identite where his little black-and-white photograph presented a boy of good French stock with the surname Lemaire to confirm it. What his cream booklet thankfully omitted was the lineage of les Israélites of his mother, whose sister had married the proprietor of the gallery in which we stood.

The officer’s unflinching eyes gave each of the documents their due before returning them, and with a look of distaste declared, “Hausfriedensbruch.” Trespassing.

“They’re onto us…” Gabin jabbed with a snide smile. The translator offered this to the officer who smiled a crooked smile of his own and offered Gabin the back of his hand. Everything disintegrated then. The storeroom erupted in a crossfire of German and French tumbling across one another as Gabin unraveled. Guns were drawn and explanations apparently made for why we were there.

I called out to him, urging him incessantly to back down when the officer with the glinting eyes laughed a harrowing, thin-lipped laugh, stopped, and lit a cigarette. He examined Gabin carefully who breathed with the same intensity as at the height of his creative passion. The officer patted him on the head like a small dog, and Gabin recoiled, seething with hatred.

It was then that the officer turned to our masterpiece. Its height and girth as impressive as its subject. As he indulged in his cigarette I could tell he couldn’t make heads or tails of it—my classically trained landscape paired with Gabin’s crude expression of raw materials. What he did surmise, mid toke, was that it was most certainly what his regime would consider a thing of cultural disease. Entartete Kunst.

His hand reached for the piece, and discovered that the large bull, snorting and kicking up dust, had been made from the hide of one—stripped, torn, and pieced back together with red clay. He withdrew with a snarl of the nose and turned to Gabin and demanded if he was responsible for this. Gabin, bearing the evidence of his passion on his hands and chest, nodded proudly. The German looked as if he might be ill and without breaking Gabin’s gaze, took his cigarette and snuffed it out in the center of the bull’s chest.

In a flash, Gabin lunged at him. I screamed his name and watched in horror as the translator slung his rifle from back to front. With a sickening crack, he struck Gabin’s temple with its butt. Gabin fell onto his chest with a dull thwack, blood spreading beneath his dark hair. At an official snap, I was seized by my arms and with one mournful look at the two most meaningful tokens of my young life, I was hauled from La Galerie Cardoze into the night.

———

Cold hard cash. Coupled with my father’s national influence and my newfound status as persona non grata with the German occupation, I was fast-tracked through the south of France and across Spain and Portugal. In Lisbon, I was escorted onto the aptly named Manhattan that returned me ceremoniously into the plush, bourbon-soaked, Brooks Brothers embrace of the red, white, and blue.

I was despondent at first, falling self-loathingly back into the well-oiled machine of squash matches, starched shirts, lunches at The Colony, and sporting a substantial buzz before cocktail hour had officially begun. I spent months lamenting Gabin; unsure if he had succumbed to or survived the altercation with the Germans. I wrote letters in abundance to any acquaintance I could unearth. I contacted the Cardozes who had fled to Manhattan before the occupation and controlled a sister gallery in Midtown. They were aware that they had been aryanized in Paris and said they had known it would come, and that we were fools having stayed at the gallery after Paris had fallen. Mrs. Cardoze assured me she had written her sister, and I gave her a card that bore my address—a loft I had claimed uptown.

Nothing came. Gabin was gone, and with him, most of my joy. So, I became something else entirely. When I was rejected for the service after Pearl, due to a chronic asthmatic condition, I laid down my brushes and the frilly ribbons of trained craft I had adopted from The National Academy of Design and my beloved Académie Julian and moved into the archives. I surrounded myself with those who had already birthed masterpieces so I didn’t have to. I dug myself so deep into the bellies of Manhattan’s finest galleries that I became a scholarly mole.

In the spring of ’43 I married Jennifer Werstler who was beautiful, and kind, and from a good old-fashioned steel family. We agreed on every element of our life. So naturally inclined were we to one another that the match felt predestined. She didn’t want children; neither did I. She hated chintz. So did I. So, I proposed. It was also in ’43 that I was approached by the American Council of Learned Societies that was feeding archival studies into the newly formed Roberts Commission. My name had somehow come about over cocktails. That I had trained in Paris, endured a skirmish with the ERR in a Jewish-owned gallery, and knew my way clumsily around the French language. With a shake of the hand over dinner, I left behind my galleries and received a desk at The Frick Art Reference Library on East Seventy-First. It was honest work, and I was impassioned by it. It brought me closer to Gabin, in a way. As I compiled my studies of European galleries at large that had been victims of the ERR, I felt I was somehow righting a wrong. I, too, was a soldier, armed with a litany of catalogues, and maps, and a string of telegrams that I pieced together from a cushioned chair.

It was after the war that my work took real meaning. As the homes of the upper echelon of the Third Reich were dismantled, the extent of the looting became apparent. It was then that I travelled between Washington and Manhattan, classifying the old masters, decoding the ERR’s systems of cataloging and identifying the gallery or personal collection from which it had been stolen. With each insurgence of information, I admit I hoped there would be clues of Gabin’s existence. That he had continued to make art through the war. But knowing his penchant for what was then emerging as the art brut movement, and detested by the dismantled Nazis, it was a fool’s hope. It had most likely been hauled to a burn pile in the night. For half a decade I had silently mourned him, and the work we had created in artistic discord and emotional harmony. But a person becomes unable to mourn at some point. The mourning becomes an empty room somewhere in the mind you learn not to revisit.

I had closed the door on this room, locked it tight and pocketed the key. I moved about my work with a dedication to preserving the collections of those who were among the living. I doted on my wife, and we had an honest life.

It was on an autumn evening in ’46 that we had agreed to join Jennifer’s brother Thomas and his wife for dinner at the home of a well-respected man of academia. The topic of his profession was beyond me. Some study of the intricacies of the human body and mind. His was an exploration of a scientific means to these elements rather than the more romantic manner in which I had always understood them.

It was a beautiful little townhouse on the Upper West Side, blocks from the American Museum of Natural History. It was beautiful in a way that was brooding. Rigid with intellect and well decorated in a way that insinuated a higher understanding of style, the place made one want to curl up with a book and learn all there was to be learned—even the processes of the vascular system.

The meal had been catered, our hostess openly admitting that her husband had married her strictly for her beauty rather than any sort of prowess domestically. I thought that was good form. It was a meal of entirely Asian influence: delicate cuts of fish dressed in ginger and scallions, a beautiful bowl of bird’s nest chicken broth, and a duck that looked as if it had been slicked up with shoe polish. I said very little over the course of the meal. It was as delicious as it was unfamiliar to my pallet. Thomas took up most of the professor’s time, railing him with so many questions on the human body and spirit that, had the food not been so immaculate, it would have turned the stomach; of which the good professor would have known every crevice.

I was feeling fine, having consumed a fair amount of wine over dinner, and pulled back Jennifer’s chair with a flourish as the professor suggested we take coffee and cordials in his library, eager to show Thomas some rare medical dossier on the practice of prefrontal lobotomies. As we entered the room, I stopped dead in my tracks. A cool film of sweat washed over me, and Jennifer looked back with a start as she had continued into the room with my arm still hooked to hers.

“Olly?” she asked, softly. “Darling, what is it?” She followed my line of sight and gasped slightly.

“It’s a bit brutish, isn’t it?” The professor said with a hearty laugh.

Above the scholar’s mantle hung an enormous work in a highly polished frame. It was my beautiful French countryside, painted in the style of Claude Lorrain. Overtop of it, Gabin’s bull—rugged hide, clay, and charcoals—kicked up the dirt of my polished composition.  

“The bull, if you look closely, has been fashioned from a deconstructed hide, and pieced together like the damned Frankenstein monster!” The professor laughed again as he accepted a glass of sherry from his wife.

“It’s mine…” I said plainly. Everyone turned with blank stares. Jennifer’s eyes went wide and her brother blushed at my declaration.

“Oliver?” Thomas asked in a threatening tone.

“I’m sorry, Professor, but that is mine…Sir, I made it. In 1940, in Paris with the help of a Frenchman named Gabin Lemaire. I believe you’ll find his eccentric flourish just there…and my more timid…” I helped myself to an ottoman footstool and stood to direct the gaze of all below to the tiny charcoal initials. “O. B. Oliver Beeckman.”

“God be good…” said the professor, fishing his spectacles from his pocket.

“A Nazi cigarette was put out just there,” I swept my hand passionately to where the ERR officer had extinguished his smoke and sent Gabin into a fit of rage.

Much to my brother-in-law’s disappointment, it was then the professor and I who exchanged stories. I told my part in the Paris debacle with the Nazis, and he told me of how his son had come across it in a salt mine in Austria where the regime had stowed a cache of stolen cultural objects. This, unlike the instantly recognized masters, had gone uncatalogued. Apparently, it had been deemed a destroyed masterpiece, of which I took a small thrill of pleasure.

“He thought, given my proclivity for the body, I would find the subject interesting, and of course he was right!”

When I broke down into shallow sobs, the professor insisted I take it. He announced to the room, with great charity, that he would arrange for it to be sent to our apartment the very next day. I asked if he wouldn’t mind having it sent to my office at The Frick.

With the bull over my shoulder, I spent the remainder of 1946 in a frantic exploration of budding art brut painters producing in France. When the names, occupations, and subject matter did not align with Gabin’s exploration of nature, I was at a loss. In January of ’47 I cast my net wider. I moved south, into Barcelona and Madrid. Hating the Germans and having a love of the men produced in Spain, I felt this would be Gabin’s most likely route had he escaped.

This proved fruitful. After an intricate amount of digging, works by an artist named Gabriel Vidal began to emerge. Canvases small and large depicted a crude nature—trees, flowers, animal hides, and skeletal remains ripped apart and fragmented back together with clay and oils in a different form. While his artwork was spread across the more metropolitan Spanish locales, I was able to trace their point of origin through bills of sale to the little village of Potes. Medieval and tucked into the beautiful Cantabrian mountains, it felt like just the place for Gabin.

I pored over the pieces by Gabriel Vidal for months. Examining each of them within an inch of their lives, each time arriving at the somewhat wistful conclusion that it truly was him.

By summer, I had convinced Jennifer to grant me travel to the Cantabrian village myself. I packed light, and that first night in the clay-roofed haven, I prayed for the first time in a long time. At morning’s light, I followed a hired guide into the sprawling hillsides. We had traveled well over a mile, uphill, and I had started to pant when we arrived at a small farm. The yard was swept clean, overrun by a flock of hens, and several shirts lulled on the line to dry. Through our vast barrier in language, the man nodded to the little stone house.

“Vidal,” he said assuredly.

My hands trembled as I crossed the yard and ran the coarse fabric of one of his shirts between my hands. There was excitement amongst the chickens that pecked the yard and it stirred the occupant of the house. I watched him rise, and he wiped his hands down his torso as I had seen him do a hundred times.

When he emerged, I fell to my knees with an elated sob. The seven years were etched onto him in a way that was beautiful. He was still lithe and his skin leathered by the Spanish sun. He was covered in clay, his hands mired dark and caked with it. The eye struck by the translator was milky white and blind while the other first went wide with shock and then wet with tears. He crossed slowly and knelt in the dirt before me, his warm hand cupping my gaunt face.

“Good of you to finally come, Oliver.”