Salle 17

Not so long ago, two paintings hung in a gallery. One, an austere Rembrandt in dark oils, featured a stately woman in black velvet. It was dark and Germanic, from the period before Van Gogh’s lucid canvas dreams. This painting was of the school that frequently featured only smoky black with small pinpricks of impossible white. Her fat fingers were coated in jewels, and she looked at the onlooker sternly, her neck covered with an impossibly thick lace collar.

Directly across the room hung a Mucha. A woman smoking languorously, sheer pastel fabric draped over not so subtle curves. Her hair had come undone, trailing all the way to the frame to finally curl around the cigarette brand name, proclaimed loudly in art nouveau lettering. A placard below stated that “Mucha had been the first to successfully objectify women for commercial purposes.” The curator had smiled at this small revenge while writing this in her curly handwriting. She did not much like studying Mucha in college, never felt comfortable around his large, lolling women, though she could not name why. The placard remained there, hanging like a red letter “A” below the print, the schoolgirl revenge long since forgotten by the now matronly curator.

The two paintings did not know why they had been placed in this room together, and viewed it with the unquestioning despondency of Greek tragedy. Once upon a time, a young curator, fresh in her power and confident in her double major in art history and women’s studies, had decided to hold an impossibly grandiose and awkwardly titled show, “The Many Roles of Women through the Ages”. This curator had long since been picked up by a private gallery in New York, and, since the show’s opening and closing, a number of Michaelangelo’s had been discovered by the museum. This lucky acquirement had become the main attraction. This room was now infrequently visited by the museums volunteer docents, on lunch or looking for a place to nap. The paintings had accepted their lot and were complacent during the day, but at night, vented their fury.

“Slut!” the dutch woman hissed, her peach jowls quivering.
The Mucha took a drag from her cigarette before blowing smoke into the frame of the other painting, making the old Rembrandt gag. The Mucha would not have admitted it, but she missed her old room, Gallery 4, with the Lautrec’s and Klimt’s. There had even been a lesser known Van Gogh, but he had been haughty and difficult to get along with. All the same, it had been good, all of them gathering together in the Absinthe bar after closing, discussing love and the humanity and above all, the revolution they were sure was coming any day.

The Rembrandt missed her old gallery as well. It had been quiet- a few baskets of fruit, a hunting dog, all serene in their own way, quiet and unassuming. They didn’t bother themselves with lofty ideals, they merely wanted to stun the onlooker into realization- realization at the rotting fruit, the snapping dogs, that this was a freshly captured moment, outside of time. It was a far higher calling then selling cigarettes, at any rate. The old marquis, who had long since been forgotten for anything more notable then being an Early Rembrandt, none the less thought of herself as following a higher calling, where art was Art, not a glorified advertisement. Though she had been but minor royalty in life, her current situation, surrounded by the banal and pedestrian, humiliated her.