Marie-Thérèse
At nine-thirty, as usual, Marie-Thérèse stepped onto the east-facing balcony of her apartment, carrying a small tray that she set on the unfolded wooden table. A demitasse of espresso, a pouch of organic tobacco and papers, a glass thimbleful of Ardbeg. She sat down on her ironwork chair, sipped coffee while looking abstractedly at the magnolia that bent towards the balcony—midway between having bloomed and blooming again—then rolled and lit her first cigarette. In half an hour they would be here. Seven floors below, at the third-nearest bakery, Melanie was choosing the croissants. High above, the clouds dispersed; a beam passed over Marie-Thérèse’s moon-shaped face, her neat white bun.
She was still there fifteen minutes later, thinking of nothing, when she heard the key rattle in the studio door and, presently, her young assistant opening and closing cupboards in the kitchenette, then the plashing tap. Marie-Thérèse remained near-motionless, observing her own breath, eyelids flickering in shifting sunlight. Then she opened her eyes, picked up and drained the whisky, and came inside to where Melanie, in relative darkness, was arranging opulently sized pastries on a plate while the sound of the boiling kettle rose. Marie-Thérèse, feeling heat in her belly, observed, and frowned. “Not that one,” she said loudly. “Get the Bernardaud.” Melanie, saying nothing, opened another cupboard door.
At ten past ten, by which time Marie-Thérèse was taking increasingly deep inhales to calm herself, the downstairs bell rang and a minute or two later the American and his daughter arrived at the half-opened apartment door. The man, besuited, in his sixties, was visibly out of breath—the building had never had a lift, probably never would—but he gamely air-kissed Marie-Thérèse and, like the pretty young woman, made wonderful-to-see-you-again noises as she smilingly reached them. “We were just in Kassel,” the gallerist said. “I loved your presentation. So beautiful and simple, and extraordinary how you could fill that huge room with so little. You could pack the show in a hatbox!”
Marie-Thérèse nodded assent. “The whole thing cost really nothing. Of course,”—she bit off the crownlike tip of her croissant, chewed, swallowed, let the pause dilate—“it had to. And the best thing was I could stay here. Everything on Zoom, lots of Zoom. It had to be right, of course, but I didn’t have to be there. I was so tired after Lyon, which as I told you was a whole other story. But, eh.”
“That’s our next stop,” said the gallerist, modulating to major while wiping golden crumbs off his forefingers. “I can’t wait to see it. Pauline was already there and said it was fabulous. What a year for you!” Marie-Thérèse gazed across at him. “Enfin,” she said. Then, while Eleanor took notes, they began discussing her first gallery show.
The gallerist liked his exhibitions hung early, up to a month before the opening, if possible—the gallery, which had spaces in three cities, did well enough that they could afford downtime—so that important viewers could see it well in advance. He also preferred that press releases, invitation cards, etc, were signed off as far in advance as possible. In the case of Marie-Thérèse’s exhibition, which she’d titled Zero Hour, all such boxes had long been ticked—show hung (via Zoom), verbiage approved, a tantalising detail image of the work on the invite—and it was now eleven days before the opening, and a Tuesday, and shortly after lunch. The gallerist’s PA buzzed him. “Alex, Miss Arnaud for you.”
He took the call. Silence, then a cartoonish horn in the far distance. “Hello?” he said into the void.
“Ah! There you are!”
“Marie-Thérèse,” making her name a sonorous arc. “Here indeed. How nice to hear you. We’re all very excited, just making the final preparations. It’s such a shame you can’t come, but as you know it all looks spectacular. We’ve had some wonderful collectors and curators here already.”
“Alex,” she punctured. “I looked at all the pictures for several hours last night. I felt something; I didn’t feel right. I looked and looked, and finally I could see it. It’s too high up.” A short tense silence. “The whole thing needs to come down six inches, maybe even a little more. It’s something to do with your ceiling.”
“That’s, ah,” said Alex, exhaling quietly through his nose. “I wish you could see it from here, my dear. It’s quite extraor—”
“I can see it on the computer and, more importantly, in my head, how it should be,” said Marie-Thérèse. Her tone pivoted placatory. “I’m sorry, I really feel very stupid. Everything’s in the right position. It just has to be lower.” The many metres of crisscrossing multicoloured strings she had sent were, as instructed, attached to the walls in over seven hundred places. A museum had already bought the work, based on how it looked in the gallery. The technicians were no doubt looking forward to the next show, where their duties consisted of hanging four large paintings.
“And obviously this isn’t the right time,” Marie-Thérèse swept on, filling the gap Alex was leaving. “But I’ve also been looking at the picture for the card. It’s too dark.”
“Ah, well,” Alex half-laughed—nothing to do there—“that’s already printed, based on what we agreed. They arrived yesterday and they’re about to be sent out, I think,” he said.
“I’m glad I caught you in time, then. I’m looking at it right now and it sends out the wrong signal. I want people to feel… I don’t know, connectedness. The work reaching out. What we had seemed good at first but now, with some time to think, it isn’t. It’s funny, isn’t it, how some things take time to reveal themselves.”
Alex rubbed the back of his neck, where it met his expensive military crop. “Marie-Thérèse,” he sighed softly, “I’d love to. But I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”
“Well, yes, there is. New cards!”
“We open a week on Saturday, printing takes a fortnight, and,”—he risked it—“you might have changed your mind by then. There’s one proudly displayed on my office mantel already and I don’t think it’s dark. And anyway, the title itself is a bit dark, isn’t it?”
Another pause. “Well. I don’t want to be difficult, Alex, and I do appreciate everything you’re doing. So I’ll just tell people how the card should have looked.”
“Mm,” said Alex vaguely. He was doodling on a little pad; he secretly admired his own phone doodles and kept the best ones in a drawer. “Let’s meet in the middle,” said Marie-Thérèse. “Since you can’t fix what you did with the card, the work comes down six inches. That you can still do.”
The show was rehung; while she was still alive, Alex thought, he could accede to her wishes, her moods. And it did look better, even if he wasn’t sure why.
And so it began, her renaissance at age eighty-seven: from fairs, to solo shows, to archive-rifling institutional presentations accompanied by doorstop catalogues, to more solo shows demonstrating the myriad formal and emotional gradations—taut, drooping, intersecting, left forlornly in heaps—of coloured string. Marie-Thérèse had created many kinds of work over the previous half-century, usually alighting on a new approach a couple of years before it swung into vogue: she’d performed, made videos, created minimalistic neoexpressionist paintings, produced ‘interventions’ on street corners that only became art through documentations, and more. But now she stuck with her self-described “light” late style, hovering above fashion and apparently the only part of her practice she cared about. When Eleanor, who’d become her liaison, invited her to consult on a retrospective, she mostly demurred:
“They can do what they like with the old things,” she said from her balcony—scanning a magazine article in which her interviewer, she remembered, had foolishly asked her opinion of Duchamp—“I don’t care. Someone else made those. But let me know when you get to the last two rooms.” After Marie-Thérèse had guided those rooms to completion in her inimitably focused way, and the unveiling had gone down to the wire, Alex sent her a crate of Japanese whisky and asked Eleanor if she could discreetly discover how old the artist’s mother had been when she died. In due course, the answer came back: eighty-nine.
Seventeen years later, having now moved up a notch in the exhibiting system—she was now working with a gallery that, while not quite the biggest in the world, had thirteen international outposts—Marie-Thérèse decided she had had enough of silly old string and that it was time for something new, something grandly befitting her soon-to-be advanced age. She now owned five floors of the building in Paris, and had a staff of sixteen, three of them people that her new gallerist, Calvin, had brought in primarily to report back on her behaviour, diet, exercise habits etc to an esteemed gerontologist, who in turn reported—periodically, sombrely and not a little bemusedly, not least because if anything Marie-Therese was now smoking and drinking more, with no discernible ill effects—back to Calvin.
Things went on in this way for some years, until Marie-Thérese was one hundred and eleven, just five years younger than the oldest living woman. The shows continued—no end to the combinatory arrangements of string, though by now the artist often let her well-briefed amanuenses have some say—Marie-Thérèse’s diligent supervisions continued, the gallery quietly built affable sublayers between her and her liaison. More bijou string rooms were conjured up, children and grandchildren of the large ones. This extended victory lap suited everyone, it seemed, until one day it apparently didn’t suite Marie-Thérèse. She informed Calvin that the next time he was in Paris—spot-checking his gallery at the airport, perhaps—he should stop by.
Marie-Thérèse, sitting on her ottoman and wrapped in several mingled layers of brightly coloured textiles, got straight to it. “I think, Calvin,” she said in what had become a somewhat slowed croak, while reaching sideways for her lighter without looking, “that we’re done with the string arrangements. I don’t know how many more years I have, but I want to leave something quite permanent and permanently me on this planet. The rooms are very nice, of course, but they’re crafty and I’m bored of them, and I can’t control how they’re presented after I go… after we go.”
“We do have the manuals, chérie,” said Calvin lightly. “They don’t leave much margin for error.”
“Anyway,” Marie-Thérèse went on, speeding up a bit, “I’ve been thinking a lot about bronzes. Large ones, large heads, around seven feet tall, eyes in your face, right on the floor, maybe painted different colours. My head—this old head now, exactly the way I am. People don’t want to look at a face like this—obviously they don’t often get to—but I want to make them do so, repeatedly.” She craned forward, widening her red eyes. “Look at me. I don’t write, but my life is written on my face. These young girls, these pretty kids you show—they’re not there yet. They’re highly incomplete. I’m made, or mostly made. I want people to confront it. I can’t be there,” she gestured vaguely around, “but this way and with your help I can be very there, and forever, no?”
Calvin did some ready reckoning. The bronzes, which he could see in his mind, would be as costly to produce and laborious to transport as the string had been cheap and—in some ways—easy, and Marie-Thérèse would surely find a way to reject a percentage of them, but otherwise he saw upsides: the gallery, whose roster was still only one-quarter female and increasingly skewing youthful, would be making a feminist and anti-ageist statement, the sculptures would be a signature work, placeable indoors and outdoors, scalable for myriad price points. He foresaw a multiyear, multi-museum rollout, at some point during which the gallery would surely have to issue their ‘It is with great regret that we announce…’ email, and regretfully move on to the business of managing Marie-Thérese’s estate without the vital input of Marie-Thérese. And he would be right, except where he was wrong.