The Great Man by Kate Christensen Page B

showing Henry, who squinted at it, unable to make out what it was from that distance. “This is a shark’s tooth. I use it to scrape lines in paint when I need fine definition. I like the idea of a shark’s tooth, but it also makes distinctive marks I can’t get any other way.”
    “You used it in
Night of the Radishes
?” asked Henry. This was easily the best-known of her works. It was a triptych completed in 1967, which now hung at the Modern and was generally considered her masterpiece: Over three panels were amorphous blooms of black paint and razorlike black projectiles, a juxtaposition that had served through the decades as an aesthetic Rorschach test for feminist scholars, Marxist art historians, Freudian and Jungian art theorists, postmodernists, and various other-ists, who’d invested it with whatever qualities best suited their ends. Henry thought Maxine’s work was beautiful but stringently monochromatic, despite what he’d said to her earlier, but even he couldn’t deny that
Night of the Radishes
was the real thing, possibly a great work of art.
    She nodded at him with a glimmering of respect. “Oscar took photographs of girls as a teenager. Black-and-white snapshots, just girls being girls, some pretty, some plain, girls in their bedrooms, riding the IRT, walking on the street, shopping, eating ice cream at Schrafft’s, whatever. He even took some of me, shooting from his bicycle as I rode mine up First Avenue, but as you can imagine, he had no trouble finding willing subjects.”
    “I haven’t seen them,” said Henry, almost hyperventilating. And he had been on the verge of leaving. Thank God he hadn’t let her throw him out. “I didn’t even know they existed. Where can I get my hands on them?”
    “Easily,” she said. “They’re at Brooklyn College.”
    “He donated them to his college.”
    “That’s right. They’re still there.”
    “But he was an art history major! He wasn’t an artist until years later.”
    “He fancied himself a good photographer. I admit the photos aren’t bad, some of them, especially the ones he took of Abigail as a girl. He kept all those photographs in a box in his studio for years. He donated them to the college’s archives only a short time before he died. I don’t know whether anyone at the college fully realizes what they are. It seems that they’ve been kept in a drawer, undisturbed since the day Oscar took them in.”
    Henry shook his head. “No one knows about them.”
    “Well, they’re awfully silly.”
    “Why?”
    “They were of silly movie star–struck, soldier-worshiping Jewish girls on the Lower East Side in the forties, mostly daughters of immigrants. Our European cousins were beaten and raped, gassed to death, skeletal, shivering with cold, while we put on lipstick and read Emily Dickinson…. It was just the luck of the draw. No doubt our cousins would have done the same in our shoes.”
    “Why aren’t they known, these photos?”
    “Well, they’ve been right there all along,” she said. “For some reason, I thought you might already have somehow magically divined they were there and dug them up. You have that eager-beaver look about you.”
    “Yes, and I’m going to eager-beaver my way over there as soon as I can,” Henry said. “I’ll give you five bucks not to tell that other biographer about them.”
    “You’re joking,” she replied, “but I won’t tell him because I don’t like him, so that’s your good luck.”
    “Thanks,” he said. “Would it be an intrusion if I asked to see some of the work you’re doing now?”
    “Not at all,” she said, gesturing to her studio. Paintings hung on walls and leaned on the floor in stacks. They were, without exception, composed of spare, feathery black fillips against a white background. This new work was more austere even than the older works Henry was familiar with.
    “This is my primary work surface,” said Maxine. She pointed to a long steel table painted