Free Bech at Bay by John Updike

shouted.
    This exchange awoke Aaron Fisch, a small and gnomish painter whose peculiar enamelled, fine-focus style of surrealistic political allegory had peaked in the late Thirties, plateaued for four popular years as war propaganda (no one could do Mussolini as he could, with five-o’clock shadow and jutting lower lip, and Hirohito in all his military braid, and Hitler’s burning black eyes in a lean white poisoned-looking face), and then had, post-war, fallen swiftly into abysmal unfashionability, though Aaron himself lived on. A decade or more ago his work resurfaced in the art magazines as an anticipation of photorealism, but his recent paintings, as his eyes and fine motor control failed, were increasingly rough, more and more like Soutine. Blinking, pushing his thick black-framed spectacles back on his small nose, he looked toward Bech and asked, “Mr. President, have we ever given consideration to Arshile Gorky? Or did he never become an American citizen?”
    “Aaron, he’s
dead
,” the other painter present, Limbaugh Seidensticker, gloomily erupted. “He committed suicide.”
    “Who?” the little surrealist asked, looking about in alarm, and almost piteously returning his pink-lidded gaze to the president, for guidance.
    “Arshile Gorky, Mr. Fisch,” Bech said.
    “Oh, of course. I knew that. A wonderful sensibility. His onions and bulb-forms; very organic. He never understood why the Abstract Expressionists took him up.”
    This may have been deliberately tactless, since Seidensticker was an adamantly abstract painter, who worked entirely with commercial paint rollers and latex colors straight from the hardware-store can. Not since his moment of revelation in 1947 had he deviated from his faith that painting’s subject was painting itself and even the rectangular shape of the canvas was an embarrassing tie with the picture/window fallacy. There were almost none like him left; the resurgence of figuration, among young artists who had no training in how to draw, had left him sputtering on his flat fields of chaste monochrome. “It’s a scandal,” he said now, “that Donald Judd isn’t a member.”
    “Oh, Limby, don’t you think if you’ve gone and seen one aluminum box you’ve seen them all?” Amy intervened, tipping up her wrinkled face to him like a round dish to be drained of its light, as the last rays of the spring afternoon bounced off the blank side walls of the truck depot opposite and sidled into Lucinda Baines’ old solarium. As if still alive with plants, this skylit interior shimmered; the faces of the Forty seemed to Bech flowers, yellowish blooms of ancient flesh suspended against the Rembrandtesque gloom of the dark leather chairs.
    “It would be a scandal if he were,” said Aaron Fisch. “What about Andy Wyeth? He’s been coming along lately. Those Helga things weren’t as bad as people said.”
    Limbaugh Seidensticker snorted. “Oh, all that
hu
man interest! All those half-rotting fenceposts and flowering weeds, stalk by stalk!
Yukk
, as the young people say.” Ragewas galvanizing his body, lifting his head into the declining light so that his rimless glasses formed ovals of blind brightness. “Next we’ll be entertaining purveyors of pictotrash like David Hare.”
    “He’s dead,” someone in the chairs said.
    “He was just a boy,” another softly exclaimed.
    Edna cleared her throat and whispered something to Bech.
    Bech said, “The directress informs me that Andrew Wyeth is already a member, though he rarely attends.”
    “In that case,” Seidensticker rather boomingly announced, “I resign.” But he did not get up from his chair.
    Bech asked the group, “Is there any more discussion of possible new members?”
    Silence.
    “Does anyone wish to second the nomination of Donald Judd?”
    Again, silence.
    “Mr. President.” Another old, especially dignified voice quavered into audibility, above the whir of Edna’s tape recorder and the muffled rumble of