For more than a hundred years, people have been saying that new machines will remake the creature, but I have seen people remain the same from horsecar to automobile, from clanking railroads to supersonic jets, from outhouse to rushing indoor cataracts.
After the weekend at Fontana di Luna, Levitsky decided there was more to be made on portraits of the rich than on catalog art, so he began to look for a proper studio for me.
He found one near Union Square, in a gloomy brownstone with a wide stoop and a parlor floor backed with glass that gave onto a northern sky.
We furnished the place in what seemed to us splendor: a fainting couch covered with Oriental rugs, a model's platform raised up on ball-footed legs, Turkish lanterns and a Turkish corner, embroidered shawls over the round table, plaster casts of Michelangelo's slaves, Donatello's David, Bernini's Daphne turning into a laurel tree.
And then the clients came, the women tittering and titillated by taking off their clothes and going into costume—for some wanted to be painted not as they were but as they wished to be: Juliet, Portia, Ophelia. (Men preferred to be painted as their heroic selves.) Many women changed into their own brilliant ball gowns and hovered over me to see that I highlighted every pearl.
Painting portraits is a good way to listen to the soul of a person hanging in the air. For the more silent I was, the more my sitters spoke. They began by establishing their wealth and station, as most people do, and ended by revealing the depths of their desires. And I would paint—the greenish shadows that define a nose, the yellow shine across a forehead, the wedge-shaped chocolate shadow below a lip. The portrait painter knows that all God's children are multicolored.
All day, I would listen to my sitters preen and talk of balls and entertainments, engagements broken or dreamed of, grand tours to Europe planned or canceled.
They spoke to me as if I understood, and soon I did. I came to know that money prevents no griefs, cures no illnesses, and that a person can be as happy standing at an easel painting as having dresses fitted in Paris and arranging balls for four hundred. Happier, in fact. As my mama used to say: "The reddest apple may also have a worm."
At night the uptown sitters vanished and the hairy downtown anarchists arrived to argue and eat, and eat and argue.
We would drink tea with jam in the Russian fashion and slivovitz and vodka, smoked fish with black bread, and when there was money enough, black caviar.
The downtown world was intent on one thing: improving the human race. They really believed that if only their ideas were adopted, mankind could be saved. This was the principal difference between then and now: intellectuals really did believe that a better world was at hand. Utopias sprouted on the old Lower East Side like tubercular children. Capital was bad, it was argued, but people were essentially good. Thus many reasoned that the abolition of capital would change the world and bring back Eden. Anarchists in their cups spoke of which capitalists they would like to shoot. They discussed weapons. They ridiculed my portraits of rich ladies (which paid for the slivovitz and smoked fish). I ridiculed them too. I referred to my fine ladies as stuck-up shiksas and my fine gentlemen as shaygetzes with watch chains. I spat on the source of my good fortune just to prove it hadn't changed me. I was still Sarah from Sukovoly—no matter how much English I learned, how many rich clients I had, how much money I saved or sent home to Mama.
My uptown sitters liked the world the way it was—except for one thing: it was changing too fast. Too many "new people" with money, too many "foreigners," too many anarchists, unionists, troublemakers. Balanced between two worlds, I listened to the innermost secrets of each. Often I wished I could tell the poor anarchists how unhappy the rich were—or tell the rich how angry the anarchists were.
But it was
After the weekend at Fontana di Luna, Levitsky decided there was more to be made on portraits of the rich than on catalog art, so he began to look for a proper studio for me.
He found one near Union Square, in a gloomy brownstone with a wide stoop and a parlor floor backed with glass that gave onto a northern sky.
We furnished the place in what seemed to us splendor: a fainting couch covered with Oriental rugs, a model's platform raised up on ball-footed legs, Turkish lanterns and a Turkish corner, embroidered shawls over the round table, plaster casts of Michelangelo's slaves, Donatello's David, Bernini's Daphne turning into a laurel tree.
And then the clients came, the women tittering and titillated by taking off their clothes and going into costume—for some wanted to be painted not as they were but as they wished to be: Juliet, Portia, Ophelia. (Men preferred to be painted as their heroic selves.) Many women changed into their own brilliant ball gowns and hovered over me to see that I highlighted every pearl.
Painting portraits is a good way to listen to the soul of a person hanging in the air. For the more silent I was, the more my sitters spoke. They began by establishing their wealth and station, as most people do, and ended by revealing the depths of their desires. And I would paint—the greenish shadows that define a nose, the yellow shine across a forehead, the wedge-shaped chocolate shadow below a lip. The portrait painter knows that all God's children are multicolored.
All day, I would listen to my sitters preen and talk of balls and entertainments, engagements broken or dreamed of, grand tours to Europe planned or canceled.
They spoke to me as if I understood, and soon I did. I came to know that money prevents no griefs, cures no illnesses, and that a person can be as happy standing at an easel painting as having dresses fitted in Paris and arranging balls for four hundred. Happier, in fact. As my mama used to say: "The reddest apple may also have a worm."
At night the uptown sitters vanished and the hairy downtown anarchists arrived to argue and eat, and eat and argue.
We would drink tea with jam in the Russian fashion and slivovitz and vodka, smoked fish with black bread, and when there was money enough, black caviar.
The downtown world was intent on one thing: improving the human race. They really believed that if only their ideas were adopted, mankind could be saved. This was the principal difference between then and now: intellectuals really did believe that a better world was at hand. Utopias sprouted on the old Lower East Side like tubercular children. Capital was bad, it was argued, but people were essentially good. Thus many reasoned that the abolition of capital would change the world and bring back Eden. Anarchists in their cups spoke of which capitalists they would like to shoot. They discussed weapons. They ridiculed my portraits of rich ladies (which paid for the slivovitz and smoked fish). I ridiculed them too. I referred to my fine ladies as stuck-up shiksas and my fine gentlemen as shaygetzes with watch chains. I spat on the source of my good fortune just to prove it hadn't changed me. I was still Sarah from Sukovoly—no matter how much English I learned, how many rich clients I had, how much money I saved or sent home to Mama.
My uptown sitters liked the world the way it was—except for one thing: it was changing too fast. Too many "new people" with money, too many "foreigners," too many anarchists, unionists, troublemakers. Balanced between two worlds, I listened to the innermost secrets of each. Often I wished I could tell the poor anarchists how unhappy the rich were—or tell the rich how angry the anarchists were.
But it was
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