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Show 195 break, god, instead of putting a robe on, she'd light a cigarette and go strolling around the room naked, looking over your shoulder to see how you were doing her." She laughed. "She made some of the guys nervous. There was this one guy-well, she'd come right up and practically hang her bosoms over his shoulder and he'd get up and walk out. He never blushed, he turned white instead. Funny, him a painter and so upset about a naked girl.* "I know how he feels." "Ummm. The model becomes a person and . . . She was so obvious though. She modeled for Mark once and did everything but trip him and beat him to the floor. He really is very attractive-and not so saintly either. According to him having girls is not only a fringe benefit of being a great artist, it's required. But he didn't want much to do with Clara and she chased him for a year. Then he got drunk at a party . . . and that's all she could talk about afterwards. She was trying to imitate some mistress of Picasso's. Hey, finish your smoke and we'll go look at the Picassos. You ever seen them?" The canvases were much larger and more impressive than I imagined they would be. We spent an hour there, me feeling sort of dominated by the great man's work, and Kate looking happy. She said he was the most creative man of the 20th century and that impressed me. I wanted to be creative too. I thought we should tour the place but she said it was too big, the thing to do was to explore parts of it at a time. Now it was late and we should go get something to eat. But on the way out we stopped in another part, mostly nudes. I knew the accepted intellectual stance, that one looked at a painting of a nude with the same esthetic distance as one looked at a still life, and I thought it must be true, but my feelings didn't believe it: before all that rich, luxuriant flesh I could almost feel my eyes dilating. What art did for me was to put me at ease, to make it legitimate to look at skin until I'd |