MONDAY MORNING, AND LILLY awaited an audience with another man at the Foundation. She wished she felt more lively, more ready to make her case, but last night she had ventured as far as Harlem and by the time she returned to her studio it was long after midnight. Even on a Sunday, incandescent bulbs had pulsed on the dance-hall marquees, illuminating the faces of young men and women dressed for a night on the town. She hadn’t time to develop anything, but she had high hopes for a few of the shots: a darkly radiant woman checking her reflection in a shopwindow, red lipstick poised at her puckered mouth; a man with coppery skin, his hat rakishly askew, pausing to buff his two-tone shoes with a handkerchief; a white couple at a ballroom entrance where the man, a strapping redhead, grinned goggle-eyed at the lights swirling overhead. Later, just as she was preparing to leave, she snapped a shot of a lone white man behind the wheel of a parked car, staring balefully at the same ballroom entrance.
This was the New York that Lilly had come seeking—a city of stolen moments and sidelong glances, back streets and narrow alleys. She wandered Chinatown at night, among the restaurants scrawled in neon and the dark shops with their jars full of mystery: shaggy tree bark, tendriled mushrooms, a root that resembled a withered hand. Or alone in the Bowery among the hollow-cheeked men so worn down by life that even the once-sharp hunger of their eyes had gone dull. Or roaming the docks that jutted into the Hudson, where she once had come upon two men, their hands in each other’s trousers, coiled in a rough embrace. Camera at the ready, Lilly stalked her subjects along the marble-faced avenues of Wall Street and among the market stalls of Little Italy. It was on the street that you could see people as they really were, but only if you knew how to look, and when. And Lilly knew. She had the eye, the sense of timing. She waited for those moments, often in great crowds, when people believed that they were insulated by anonymity, and so they dropped the masks they wore in more direct encounters. A friend of hers in Paris had painted his Leica black in order to make it less obtrusive. A secret eye. He didn’t want the glint of chrome to alert his subjects to the presence of a camera. But Lilly didn’t need any of that trickery. People were willing to overlook a woman with a camera, especially if she was no great beauty. And if they did see her, she was easy to dismiss: just some tourist. What harm could she be?
For all of her success, even Lilly would admit that this was not the life her parents had imagined for her. Lilly’s father had been the director general of a large dye factory, where he spent his days poring over ledgers and finalizing order sheets. The Great War had been hard all around, but Meyer Bloch’s factory had produced the dye used in half the uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian army and so the family had prospered. Even as that prosperity waned in the postwar years, Lilly’s mother maintained their home as one of the liveliest salons in Prague. Artists, musicians, writers, and hangers-on filled the grand house as Madame Bloch puppet-mastered conversations, arguments, liaisons, house concerts, and exhibitions. She often explained to Lilly the vital role of the patron, and how it was her calling to transmute the base coin of industry into the pure gold of art. It had been her mother’s great wish that Lilly would follow in her footsteps, and throughout her youth, Lilly had accompanied her mother on trips to Paris—always Paris—to find which way the winds of culture were blowing. Every gallery in the City of Light knew Madame Bloch and knew not to waste her time with Monet, Seurat, or you-must-be-joking Corot. She sought only the new, she had a discerning eye, and she could negotiate a sale the way Talleyrand hashed out a treaty. Madame Bloch imagined that one day Lilly would marry well, recharge the family coffers, and devote herself to her own style of alchemy—curating not only art but artists.
But Lilly did not want to curate, to collect, to purchase—she wanted to make. If her mother’s genius lay in her ability to recognize art that would matter (or that she would make matter), Lilly’s talents lay in sensing the moment and having the reflexes to capture it. She had first tried her hand at painting but was soon seduced by photography. Perhaps it was because her mother had so little interest in this field; the camera, to her, was nothing but a machine for creating ghastly portraits drained of life and color. To Madame Bloch, there was something too coldly industrial about the camera for its products ever to be elevated into the leafy glade of art. Only a painting—an image filtered through the mind of a true artist—could depict the soul of its subject. Could a photograph match the raw beauty of a Schiele portrait? Or Matisse’s riots of color and shape—could those be re-created on a sheet of chemical-soaked paper?
Lilly could not be dissuaded, and her choice of the camera over the paintbrush may have been an unspoken oath of allegiance to her father. While she loved her mother—and she did love her, everyone loved Madame Bloch, who allowed no other choice, with her grand manners and vast expressions of delight, her life lessons cast into compact aphorisms and her freely offered pronouncements, her stock of stories and her devil-may-care generosity—Lilly’s father offered a simpler and more doting kind of affection. Lilly knew he cared for her, even if he never said it in as many words. He could have come out against her attending the Arts Academy, but did not, could have forbidden the installation of a darkroom in what had previously been a linen closet, but did not. Photography was somehow a recognition of the role of industry—dirty, smelly industry—in making her who she was. From a cocktail of toxins and metals, her father extracted money, her mother a persona, and Lilly—a reason for being.
At twenty, Lilly had set out for Paris, where her mother’s reputation allowed for a rapid entry to salons and ateliers. A canny gallery owner whose country home in Brittany was largely funded by Madame Bloch’s purchases introduced Lilly to Man Ray, and in the years that followed she sought out others whose experiments, in studios and on the street, extended the borders of what film could be. All the while, her mother fretted that entering the art world as an acolyte rather than a patron would only doom Lilly to the role of dilettante, hanger-on, or—horror of horrors—muse. Madame Bloch had had the misfortune of meeting many self-styled muses over the years—they were a necessary inconvenience if one was to consort with artists—and found them to be a generally hysterical lot. More than once, a teary, bandit-eyed girl had come to the house begging to know the whereabouts of some painter Madame Bloch had hosted the previous week, and who had left it to his patron to break the news that he had already returned to Madrid or Paris or Moscow or Berlin. Madame Bloch did not want her daughter among this disposable, pitiful tribe.