Catalogue Raisonne Read Online Free Page B

sketch?” I asked.
    I knew it was, but it was a story Hans loved to tell.

3
    A nd on a personal note,” Walter concluded his short speech, “I’d like to thank Neale on behalf of all of us for bringing this milestone exhibition to grace our gallery.”
    The burst of applause was heartier than it needed to be, perhaps signifying a group effort to dispel the torpor induced by the mayor’s long,
droning, often ignorant and at times nonsensical, introduction. His Worship actually wore his chain of office in public, especially to functions like this, like a portly ham actor at an audition for the part of Cardinal Wolsey. Laughter was not always kept in check until he had moved a decent few steps away. His “addressed remarks” had included a congratulatory telegram from the Lieutenant-Governor, sadly unable to attend, but wishing “every success and a long run,” perhaps confusing the show with a play.
    â€œThroughout the long months of its careful preparation,” Walter went on, somewhat confusingly since he seemed to have finished already, “he has shown nothing but the most scrupulous dedication to his project, meticulous attention to the smallest details, the diligence of a true scholar, and, er, unwavering persistence in the face of, er, philistinism. Neale?”
    The laughter, still mayorally enhanced, at Walter’s philistine jibe and the artful “er”s that framed it, subsided slowly as Neale rose. He was frowning faintly. He walked lopingly to the lectern and stood for a few moments in silence, towering and swaying slightly, blinking from behind round wire-framed glasses, as if trying to bring the people below him into focus. They, seventy-five of them or so, held their plastic wine glasses and peered back at him, trying to do the same.
    Start with the clothes. Whereas Walter had worn another well-calibrated black suit, cut sharply enough to distinguish him from the businessmen without quite alienating them, Neale was dressed, not badly, but confusingly. A scuffed but expensive-looking brown leather jacket over a fawn turtleneck sweater; dark brown cords; blond shiny cowboy boots, also leather, that elevated him up near the six and a half foot mark. It might have been a Toronto look, though it didn’t really seem to be. Yet Toronto was assumed to come into it somehow. Of all the “statements” Neale made, or was suspected of making, the one clear and agreed-on one was that, although he’d only been an assistant curator at the AGO, still he was somehow slumming here. Address had something to do with this. Preferring to avoid rush hour traffic, he rented a top suite (rumoured to be mostly unfurnished) in the Bay 200 tower, but late every Friday night, at the end of his five-day exile, he returned to the Big Smoke. Bud lived in Toronto too, but he took the
Go bus in each morning, which was somehow more excusable. Walter, on the other hand, lived in one of the posh nestled lanes below the escarpment, an old house sprucely landscaped, with the artistic license of “ground cover” instead of lawn. Barbara, just as impeccably, lived with her professor husband in a Tudor-style home in Westdale near the university.
    Neale also gave the impression that he’d never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass. Never a winning impression in a steeltown. Not even in its art gallery. Even Walter managed to avoid it, dropping occasional mentions of his “mining days” in the summer while at university.
    Before the mutual inspection got too far into the prickly stage, Neale gripped both sides of the lectern, and raising his eyes to a spot near the top of the closed curtains in the lounge, said, “Surrealism is not a new means of expression, or an easier one. It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it.” After a pause to let this sink in, he added, darting a piercing look downwards, “Bureau de