Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 432 - 435

Richard Britell

432. My art teacher was very impressed with my color acuity, but she did not think I could ever be an artist, saying, "Albert, you draw like a six year old, but your skill with color could be very useful if you decided to be an art critic, or perhaps an art historian.

433. Don't you sometimes wish you could go back in time and reprimand your old teachers who years ago gave you stupid advice that turned out not only to be wrong, but disastrous.

434. That is what I would like to do, go back in time and tell my old art teacher that you don't have to draw to be able to be an artist, on the contrary, being able to draw is a positive detriment. Could Jackson Pollock draw? If he had been able to draw like the old masters would he ever have done his paintings.

435. Just picture little Jackson Pollock in grade school and his teachers are hovering over him and saying, "Oh Jackson your drawings are so beautiful, just like Michelangelo."  And then they would get him to read Vasari's biography  of Giotto. 

Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 428 - 431

428. The policeman got on his intercom and said "Be on the lookout for a boy in a green jacket."

429. Green jacket!? Was the policeman an idiot; was he deaf? I had said a chartreuse and black checked hunting jacket, and he reports a green jacket.  Then I had a revelation, I had color acuity, and probably the policeman did not have color acuity, this was an example of the serious importance of my unique skill.

430. Realizing the policeman probably did not have color acuity was a great revelation to me, but it raised very serious problems for my childish mind to cope with. I realized that there is never a way to know just what another person sees, when they are seeing red! And if you describe a color with words, you may satisfy yourself that your description has meaning, but you can never have any idea what is in someones mind.

431. In my book on the color red I tried to explain this problem of not knowing what someone else sees, when they say that are seeing the color red. It was a hard idea to explain back when I was in grade school, but I gave it a try. I expected to flunk my book report, because I wrote a book instead of reading one, but my art teacher gave me an A+.

Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 424 - 427

424. But I hated our art teacher and I had no intention of  reading a book on an artist.  I decided to create my own book, and I thought up the title right away, it was going to be called, "One Hundred And One Shades Of Red. It would be great and sell thousands of copies. The first line was, "There are a great many various shades of red." People would not be able to put down a book like that.

425. During the time I worked on my book about the color red I had an experience that showed me just how important my color acuity was.

426. I saw a boy steal a pocketbook from an old woman. The police asked me  for a description of the thief, and invited me to ride in the police car to to try and identify the suspect.

427. I said to the police man, "The boy is blond, and he is wearing a black and chartreuse hunting jacket. "Whatszat?" the policeman asked. "You know", I replied, "Light green tending toward yellow. " 

Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 420 - 423

Richard Britell

420. If my poor mother could have known how I would turn out she would be very confused; there is hardly a thing I have said or done in my adult life that would have made any sense to her.

421. My father was no help either because he died just a year before I discovered my 'color acuity'. His death was sudden and happened while he was working, running one of those huge linotype machines in a printing plant. setting type in lead. My mother always said, "Lucky thing he died when he did, it was a God send." But why she said that I will tell you at some other time; right now I want to tell you all about my 'color acuity.'

422. I could think of no occupation that would use my color acuity but  I decided to work on my special talent by creating a color collection. I collected paint color samples from the paint store, and put them into pages in a scrap book.  I added various shades of the same colors as a collage, cut out from the pages of magazines. If the colors had names I tried to memorize them, and if not I would  come up with my own names like 'lavender mist' or 'sepia serenade.'

423. Then, as luck would have it, our long suffering art teacher decided to give us a home work assignment. She was not content to just pass out the crayon boxes and ask us to make a design on manila paper while the classroom descended into pandemonium and she sat at her desk reading a book. She wanted us to do a book report on a famous artist.

Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 416 - 419

Richard Britell

416. "Yes" Buboni exclaimed, The Doctor pronounced that I had the finest color acuity he had ever seen. There was no talk of Rheumatic Fever, or anything like that, just 'finest acuity.'  Finally there was something about myself that was different  in a good way. This, I thought, was the key to my personality and my future. My identity must be somehow intertwined with looking at various colors, but what sort of job that was I had no idea.

417. You would think that I would have hit upon the idea of being an artist, if I had remarkable color acuity, but there you are totally wrong. I did not come from the sort of family in which the idea of being an artist, or a writer, or a musician ever came up, and if it did it would have been greeted with derision. No, the Great Depression was not a time that made parents long for their children to become poets, composers and painters.

418. My mother was the secretary to the vice principal in charge of discipline at the high school and so all day long she had to tell students to "Sit over there" while they waited to be disciplined by Mr. Bell. Her view of the world was very restricted and consisted of an image of a troupe of boys on their way to perdition. Her only hope was that my brother and I would make it through high school and get a good job working at the Grand Union Supermarket.

419. My mother was aware that there were other jobs than working in the supermarket, but hers was a world of class divisions, and the jobs the college kids got were for the rich who, she said, "Talked with a hot potato in their mouth."

Chapter 11, Childhood Of The Art Historian, parts 412 - 415

Richard Britell

412. In the morning Buboni came to his senses; his temperature was lower, but still above a hundred. The hospital staff did not ask us to leave so we sat around the hospital room drinking tea. Aunt Jemima stayed with us even though her shift was finished and Buboni entertained us with stories about his childhood. This was the first time he had said  anything about himself or his past; you will remember that all we knew about him was gathered from blogs from his time teaching art history at Cambridge.

413. I was a scrawny child and not very good looking and aware of being different from everyone else. In grade school they would line us all up and take us to the school doctor who examined us one at a time, as we stood in a long line in our underwear. Each child presented his naked chest to the doctor's stethoscope; he listened for a brief moment and then waved them off and gestured for the next child to come up.

414. When it was my turn I presented myself to the doctor's stethoscope; instead of listening for just a second as with the other boys, he would furrow up his brow, listen intently and then ask, "Have you ever had Rheumatic fever." When I said no the doctor would say something like, "odd," and mark down something on my chart. This was an annual experience along with vision and hearing tests all of which made me frantically anxious.

415. We were sent for an unusual examination; to be tested to see if we were color blind. We entered a small room where there was a doctor sitting at a table. We looked at several cards on which were multicolored patterns. In these patterns of colored shapes one could see letters and numbers indistinctly. My color blindness test went well but the doctor made me do it over several times. Finally he exclaimed, "I have never seen anything like this, you have the finest color acuity I have ever seen". 

Richard Britell

Ranting and Raving, parts 408 - 411

Richard Britell July 26, 2012

408. What Buboni said in his fever: When artists die they all go to hell, and once there they find themselves in huge museums among crowds of museum visitors. They sit on little marble benches along the walls of lofty  marble rooms.

409. And in those museums their works are never shown, but only the works of their rivals. So Warhol has to look at Pollock retrospectives, and Franze Kline and Jules Olitsky meet Mark Rothko and Gorky and spend the day admiring the works of Norman Rockwell. And if the devil hears one sarcastic comment they are forced to look at Thomas Kinkade instead.

410. Poor old Picasso is locked up in the basement of the Prado, and must stay there for a hundred years or until he agrees to look only at the works of Goya, which are the only thing on the walls there in Madrid.  He admits that he likes “The disasters of War”, but he only wishes that his Guernica image would not be used on the place mats in the cafeteria.

411. Even Michelangelo and Raphael are in hell, along with Bernini and you would not believe me if I told you what they have to do there. The three of them have to curate exhibits of parochial school student’s paintings of portraits of the Pope. They have looked at fifteen million slides already, and the best picture gets a blue ribbon. Eternity will go by, and they are never going to agree, not even two out of three. These was the sorts of things Buboni was saying, but in the morning he came to his senses.