“While I’m up here,” I said, “would you show me some of what you’re working on, art-wise? Or is that a bit weird?”
She giggled. “A bit weird,” she said, wandering over to a stack of paintings by the wall, “but sort of nice. Yeah, okay. How about this one? It’s a riff of one of the Turkish baths in Budapest. I really loved the tile—look, I wanted to represent the mosaic I saw there in abstract. I used these brushes. . . .”
Even though the canvases she showed me were all clearly originals, studies of places she’d seen, landscapes that had stayed with her, I found myself interested and asking questions. Real ones. At first, I was trying to distract myself from how I was still uncomfortably turned on—a case of my body acting without my brain’s permission—but she spoke with such authority about the work she made, rifling through canvases in her little fur-collared coat. I was coming to realize that I always found that compelling, that kind of mastery and passion, that she could be talking about her rock collection this way and I’d still want to know more.
We’d come to the back of her finished work. “These last few are exercises for class,” she said. I caught a glimpse of a piece that looked familiar.
“Wait,” I said. “That looks like—well, Picasso, actually.”
“That’s because it is.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “It is.”
“Simon,” she said, ruffling my hair, “you’re really sort of adorable.” While she pulled out the painting for me to get a better look, I decided that I needed to do something about my haircut.
“It’s a take on the really famous one, The Old Guitarist. For Nathaniel’s forms and figures class. All first-year students have to take it. He’s really into imitation as a teaching practice.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, peering at the painting. It was obvious what it meant, but I wanted to hear her say it. Especially because this didn’t seem like an outright copy. I didn’t know much about Picasso, but I was pretty sure that the guitarist in his painting was a man. This was an elderly woman, wrapped around an instrument that wasn’t a guitar.
“It’s a kokyū,” she said in response to my unasked question. “My father has one in the house. It belonged to my great-aunt. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” I reached out to skim my fingers across the canvas. “Why doesn’t he have you come up with your own ideas?”
“Because, when you’re searching for your own style, it can be useful to try on those of successful artists. Nathaniel says we should see what we can steal from them. So, like, if I imitate Picasso, really try to do the same thing with my brushstrokes that he did with his, I’ll probably fail, but I’ll understand something about his process and so,” and she put on a Nathaniel voice, “‘I’ll learn something about my own! About my soul!’”
“He really loves his souls,” I said.
“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “He got kind of angry at me for changing out some of Picasso’s elements here. Said I was straying too far from the assignment. During critique, he said the nicest things about the paintings that looked like exact copies. It seemed kind of stupid, honestly. I was still working with Picasso’s style.”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to my next question. “Does he just have a thing for Picasso?”
“No,” she said. “He works in conjunction with the art history teacher. Hands out a list of painters that she teaches in her first-month overview. It’s like this whole project—we study the painter we choose, their life, their history, really get a feel for their work. It counts for both classes.”
“Who else do people imitate?” She gave me a funny look—I was asking too many questions. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down. “I’m just . . . it’d be good to have a jump on this assignment if I ended up coming here.”
Marie-Helene laughed. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “Go get me another coffee from the café, and we can try a little breaking and entering.” At my shocked look, she amended, “Into my friends’ studios. What did you think I meant?”
At that moment, she sounded so much like Holmes that my stomach turned. Was that why I wanted to immediately run off and do what she told me to? Stupid, so stupid, I thought, what is it with these girls? Why do I always end up trailing after them? But this one studied under Nathaniel, and she had a group of friends who were forging paintings, whether or not they knew that was what they were doing, and no, I didn’t want to be with her, but she had this immaculate spray of freckles across her nose, and so of course I told her yes, what kind of latte did she want this time?
“YOU KNOW, THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST NOT-DATE I’VE EVER had,” Marie-Helene said, pushing open the door to her friend Naomi’s studio. It wasn’t real breaking and entering, of course; there wasn’t even any lockpicking involved. People had their personal supplies stored in strongboxes under their tables, but the spaces appeared to be communally used.
“Naomi did her project on Joan Miró. A lot of people did. Professor Ziegler was pretty funny about it, actually,” she said, and now I had Nathaniel’s last name. “He had an unofficial prize for the best one and hooked them up with some kiosk outside the Centre Pompidou—the museum—that sells imitation paintings to tourists. Supposedly you make pretty good money doing it.”