Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/82

 stood. Useless to tell this girl a painter didn't have to make things recognizable any more, that a painter had the right, duty, to make a painting without representative associations.

The egg oval of this girl's face, with its high cheekbones and enormous almond-shaped eyes, excited his fingers. There was something vaguely familiar about her, reminding him of Paris, Paris green—Marie Laurencin! Yes, she looked like the fragile girls Laurencin painted, except for her blue eyes. All she needed was a black accent, perhaps a ribbon around her throat. A good model was half the battle, gave one ideas. He certainly could do as well as a woman painter. Women really couldn't be artists. This girl would be wonderful for action poses. Degas drew ballet girls. Made quite a reputation at it.

There was that 1918 May night at the Paris Opéra when he and a group of painters had shouted and declaimed allegiance to whatever ism raised its head so long as new. Down with the old—no matter how good some of it might be. In the coming Utopia art would at last be resolved to the "Pure!"—to the "Functional!" But the next morning, golden and fragrant as May can be in Paris, his head too thick to work, he walked to the Luxembourg under a gentle snow of chestnut blooms. The gallery of white marble nymphs and Houdon busts was clammy as he passed through with derogatory indifference to the gallery where the 19th century paintings awaited admittance to the Louvre like souls in Purgatory. Among them was a Degas oil of a ballet scene. A marvel of form and line. Clem had bitten his lower lip as he looked at a shadow under the nose of a figure to see what color Degas had used. Odd, he thought, that his paintings are so different in technique from his pastels. Different palette too. He's not really much of a colorist in oils but there's always something interesting about a theatre scene, even in such academic technique. These old realistic approaches are dead as door-nails. I wonder if he posed each model or developed it from a theatre sketch. You had to admit he could draw and knew how to get what he wanted. But we don't want things like that today. A wave of chilling loneliness swept over him and his wounded leg ached. Think I'll go and sit in the garden, it's chilly in here.

Clem observed Lucy examining him solemnly. Of course a kid in Nebraska might not understand about being an artist's model. The word provincial brushed his mind. There had been a phase in Paris when he had thus referred to himself, remarking with a deprecating smile that he was from the American provinces. To say one was a 70