Tales of the Night by Peter Høeg

Author:Peter Høeg [Høeg, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

PORTRAIT OF THE AVANT-GARDE

ON AN OCTOBER DAY IN 1939, the painter Simon Bering and his friend Nina sailed out to the island of Christiansø. They sailed from Svaneke harbor on his twenty-eighth birthday, by which time six years had elapsed since the major exhibition at which his paintings had first made a wide public catch their breath the way one does when stepping out into the cold, then caused their eyes to water as if in a stiff headwind, and thereafter—and ever since—moved them to part with their money for a share in his faith in the future.

Simon painted large-scale canvases across which the twentieth century progressed as an unrelenting cavalcade of machines and horses and military detachments and forest fires. Back then, these had raised a storm that had not yet died down and had gone so far as to blow him into the Reichskammer der bildenden Künste, to which only a very few foreigners of immaculate racial pedigree were ever admitted.

One March night ten years earlier, as if in a fever Simon had painted the first of these pictures, works that did not close up to form flat planes but instead opened up like gateways into the future, and on this day in October he felt as though what was now happening to him came as a direct result of that night a decade before, as though—on a new and higher plane, so to speak—he was reliving that first breakthrough to himself.

A weaker character might have been bowled over by such fame, but not Simon, who believed that he belonged to a generation and a race healthier than any before them had ever been. With the money that all at once began to pour in, he placed a hard-nosed agent between himself and the public and bought property in the center of Copenhagen, an old yellow house with a garden surrounded by high walls. Here he found the relative peace at the eye of the typhoon, here he was able to work, and here the gale that howled around his pictures and his person filtered through to him as no more than a gentle tailwind bringing congratulations and a soft rain of gold.

He could have chosen to live and work as a recluse. He could have had his vast paintings carted off through the gates of the yellow house and could have watched from a safe distance as they detonated like shells in the capitals of Europe, but he did not. For Simon was also a speech maker. He felt a powerful urge to use words to speed the truths contained in his paintings on their way, for the word is also a brush and with it he wished to stand up in front of an assembly, to feel the crowd seething, to look upon these weaker brethren as a white canvas set before him, to make electrifying contact, create awareness, and then lean forward and apply his own hectic flush of color to the white faces upturned to his like so many blank pages.

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