Quick telephoned in sick on the Monday, and was still not back by Wednesday, and I was too tied up working with Pamela to get everything ready for the opening night of the exhibition to go and see her. Reede was amassing an impressively eclectic list of attendees for ‘The Swallowed Century’, and had placed Pamela and me in charge of organizing the invitations. Reede wanted coverage, relevance, attention – for the Skelton Institute to be cool and viable, a place where money flowed – and Rufina and the Lion was going to help him. Mixing high culture with pop, there was even a rumour that a Cabinet minister might turn up. And it had to be said, Rufina and the Lion, as both an intellectual challenge and an aesthetic offering, more than stood up to it. Reede had commissioned a frame for the painting, the first it had probably ever had. He had good taste; it was a dark mahogany, and it pinged Rufina’s colours out even more.
Julie Christie had confirmed she was coming, as had Robert Fraser, the art dealer. Quentin Crisp, Roald Dahl and Mick Jagger had all been invited. I thought the Jagger invitation an unusual choice, but Pamela pointed out that earlier in the year, when the Rolling Stone had been put in custody on a drug charge, the papers reported that he’d taken with him forty cigarettes, a bar of chocolate, a jigsaw puzzle, and two books. Pamela knew everything about the Stones. Mick’s first book was about Tibet, she told me. The second was on art.
The newspapers picked up the story of the exhibition, as Reede had hoped they would. The Daily Telegraph ran a headline on page 5: The Spanish Saint and the English Lion: How One Art Expert Rescued an Iberian Gem. According to the journalist, An extraordinary, long--lost painting by the disappeared Spanish artist Isaac Robles has been discovered in an English house, and will be brought to public recognition by Edmund Reede, art historian and Director of the Skelton Institute. I wondered what Lawrie might make of this last sentence – or indeed, Quick – for both of them, in very different ways, were helping Reede achieve his aims. It annoyed me, but it did not surprise me.
In The Times, the art correspondent, Gregory Herbert, wrote a long essay focusing on rediscovered artists like Isaac Robles – and how paintings such as Rufina and the Lion both reflected and extended our understanding of the turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century. Herbert was invited for a private view, and he told us, as he stood before the painting, that he’d fought in the International Brigades in 1937, before the Spanish government had sent the volunteers home.
In Auschwitz and at Hiroshima, Herbert wrote, the toll has been written in ledgers and carved on sepulchres. In Spain, the Republican dead can be tallied only in the heart. There are few marked graves for those who lost the Civil War. In the name of survival, damage was internalized, becoming a psychic scar on toxic land. Murderers still live near their victims’ families, and between neighbour and neighbour twenty ghosts trudge the village road. Sorrow has seeped into the soil, and the trauma of survivors is revealed only by their acts of concealment.
Even today, Pablo Picasso still stays away from the Andalusian city of Malaga, despite being its most famous son. When Spain broke apart, many artists escaped the cracks, fleeing to France or America rather than endure isolation, imprisonment and possible death. Life in its variety was cauterized, and so was art. For the poet Federico García Lorca it was too late to escape. One can only surmise that Lorca’s fellow Andalusian, the painter Isaac Robles, may have met a similar fate.
Spain’s past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher’s slab. When the war ended, -people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies, and soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language allowed for their pain. But the paintings, at least, remain. Guernica, the works of Dalí and Miró – and now Rufina and the Lion, an allegory of Spain, a testament to a beautiful, wild country at war with itself, carrying its own head in its arms, doomed for ever to be hunted by lions.
By the end of Herbert’s essay, you would imagine that Isaac Robles was well on his way to becoming highly collectible, enjoying a second renaissance of prices the likes of which the humble painter himself would never have dreamed. Herbert sounded so sure that he knew what the painting was about, that Isaac Robles had intended a political commentary on the state of his country. But I thought the painting, combined with the images of Justa in Women in the Wheatfield, seemed more personal – sexual even.
By the Thursday, when Barozzi and the other Guggenheim -people from Venice arrived with their paintings – an ambassadorial art entourage, with better presents and suits – Quick was still not back, and Reede was furious.
‘She’s not well,’ I said. Quick wasn’t answering her telephone. The nearer the exhibition had drawn to opening night, the further she had shrunk away from it. Even though I feared the pressure of the impending opening was crushing her, I almost hoped it would crack her open whatever the consequence, so the secret she was hiding from me would be forced into the light.
‘I don’t care if she’s on her death--bed,’ Reede raged, and I shuddered his the macabre accuracy. ‘This is the most important visit to happen to the Skelton in all my twenty years and she can’t even be bothered to show up?’