Art and Tony

TONY stands now before the assistant’s desk in the Children’s Museum. She sees but a small portion of him. He is only eight. There is visible a shock of rich, upstanding, brown hair; a wide brow; deep black eyes, so full of changing mood that their color seems negligible; an ordinary, unformed, small-boy nose; lips full and red against eager, snapping little teeth — one gone. His head is well back, jauntily set on his shoulders. His shirt was a color, once. It is mostly gray, where it is not black with grime, or slit, showing a bit of the child’s thin chest.

Tony is legion — one of many, still distinctly Tony. He fits in tightly glued to his ‘gang,’ yet there is always some recalcitrant edge that catches one’s attention and, out of all ‘Little Italy,’ makes him potently himself. He is, by just that much, one to be watched — ‘a little difficult’ on ordinary days, a young brown demon on rushed ones. If he stands too long, or if he is closely companioned, the assistant’s nostrils twitch involuntarily, for in Tony’s house garlic is possibly a trifle overemphasized, while perhaps bathtubs are not sufficiently stressed.

‘Do you want to draw, Tony?’

‘Sure.’

Tony goes out, a rectangle of binder’s board on which is a piece of ‘bogus’ paper in one hand, a red pencil, with ‘a ’raser what you rubs wid, please’ clamped in his other brown fist. He usually has a vanguard, a rearguard, and a ‘ mud guard ’ of attendants, — they are dirty, — similarly equipped. His bare feet will not walk. Suppressed skips make his toes wriggle, and his whole nondescript figure rocks with intimations of activity ‘not allowed in dis place.’

Tony comes of a race of explorers undaunted. The great Christoforo Colombo was his ancestor. How young one feels! How crude and new a thing it seems to be an American, even though of New England stock, when looking into the saucy face of Tony — in whose country, so early, art reached her blossoming; whose Amerigo Vespucci named these shores, a few hundred years ago.

Tony is worthy of his noble heritage. Neither he nor any of his kind, when armed with a pencil, fears to tackle anything made by God, Man, or Praxiteles.

In a few moments Tony and his retinue return.

‘I wish, Tony, you would try harder and not draw so fast.’

‘Me de queek draw-er, me de queekest draw-er’ — with a sumptuous look of superiority and kindly scorn at his companions.

The assistant experiences a feeling of triumph, in her turn, justly earned, as she mentally constructs Tony’s dashing, tripping lines into a recognized form.

‘So you drew the Venus, Tony, the beautiful white one in front of the gray velvet curtain, with the light above her head?’

‘Yep; and say, teacher,’ — the ageold question — ‘Say, teacher, who was de guy dat knocked off de lady’s arms ?‘

Tony says this with an air that clearly means—‘If I just ketch dat guy, I’ll plunk him one!’

If there is leisure, — and sometimes there is, — Tony and the others press close around the assistant — sharp elbows, fascinating curves at the back of brown necks, and mysteriously wide eyes, momentarily make up her landscape while she talks. She thinks of their homes. Arms get bruised there in angry brawls, she supposes, if not ‘knocked off’; and it is hot and dirty. Three babies occupy the space by many deemed too small for one. She thinks of what she knows of Greece trailing lovely fingers in the Ægean. She thinks of the temples and olive groves and Olympic games, white, taut figures flashing to the goal; the discus hurtling its way through fact and myth — just the first, obvious things. How fuse Tony’s background, or lack of it, with the classic environment of the Venus de Milo of Praxiteles?

The one possible connection, as she sees it, is that Tony comes to the Museum and draws ‘the lady’ because, of his own free will, he wants to. Her beauty — static, and seemingly eternal — has caught his fickle, eightyear-old consciousness.

The assistant tries. For a long time the head of the Children’s Museum and the curator of the whole department work with and for Tony and his kind. At last, —

‘You know,’Tony announces, ‘I saw the Venus the other day.’ He now knows ‘the lady’s’ name. ‘I knew she corned from this Museum and Greece.’

‘Where did you see the Venus, Tony?’

‘I saw her on a box, a shoe-box, So-ro-sis,’ — spelling, — ‘and I cut dat picture out wid me knife. I’d have it yet, ’cept my little sister — you know, Santina, I brought her last Sunday — busted it and kind of chewed it up.’

Tony is, unless the law of averages mercifully gives way in his case, going to dig ditches, or work in a steel mill with white hot metal, or, at best, run a fruit-stand of his own. He is to be of the common rank and file, unheeded by the front line of culture in America. Yet at eight he is making headway with the ‘First’ of antiquity. That is well. When the guards are not looking, in spite of ‘ please do not touch,’he will undoubtedly smooth her drapery with an impish, inquisitive, brown little finger; he knows the place of her inception; can recognize her when he sees her; and can speak the name of the Venus.

Nor does his familiarity with art end there.

‘Dat Madonna of—of Buglioni — he was Italian like Nick there and me. Dat Madonna wid de pickles around it is swell! We got lots of pictures of her in our church. We got a statue, too. My cousin, he lights de candles fer her every Sunday. Maybe he will go to high school, if my uncle ain’t laid off de railroad.’

‘Why do you like that Buglioni Madonna, Tony, with the garlands of fruit around it?’

There is a suggestion of ‘pickles’ in the garland, gray-green against lemonyellows, and low-keyed orange picked out with cream and brown.

Also there is a suggestion of those offerings of housewifely skill placed on the altar of the Divinity by faithful women since the first fire was built under the first clay-daubed basket.

And a suggestion too, —

To the casual observer, however, the garland might remain unnoticed in the general charm of the Holy group; but Tony’s artistic perception evidently has a gastronomical slant, as indeed has Keats in the above quotation.

‘What do I like about dat Virgin? Oh, de blue, I likes, and de shine.’

‘You know, Tony, once there was an artist in your country whose name was Luca della Robbia. He knew more about that “shine,” — glaze, we call it, — and that blue, than any of the other artists. But Buglioni, who made our Madonna, worked much in the same way. That is what is meant by “school of Luca della Robbia.” Did you notice, on the label?’

‘Guess I’ll be a “school of” dat man when I gets big — ’lessen I ’m a movie operator. Goin’ to have a show today?’

Tony means: ‘Are you going to have a Saturday afternoon entertainment for your people?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it goin’ to be about?’

‘About the knights upstairs in the Armor Court, I think.’

A howl goes up. Restraint is for the moment non-existent. Roland — Tony, fighting in the pass for Charlemagne; Arthur—Tony, in his own eyes, king over Sir Kay and Sir Lancelot; and all the glory of chivalry personified in Tony, live for Tony in that Armor Court. He and ‘Nick there,’ arm-inarm, swaying with excitement, if left alone, exult in the primitive.

‘Nick and Tony, come here and look at the tools in this case. The sword you are talking about was probably made with tools like these. Just think, Tony, a solid lump of iron, and then that sword! Do you think you could draw that pattern with your pencil?’

‘Naw’ — for once, Tony, the indomitable, is abashed.

‘Then think of making it in metal.’

How curb this barbarism, and make it look with caressing eye at the burnished surfaces of ‘cold steel’ warmed by flower-like traceries, dreamed of, one is sure, in spring?

‘Hammer at them,’ says the head of the Children’s Museum.

The assistant is still laboring at the forge.

Standing in front of a mummy case, one wearily makes the seemingly unexciting statement: ‘A man who once lived in the desert country, the model of which you have seen in the Children’s Museum, was buried about four thousand years ago in this coffin. Think back as far as the first Christmas, and then back as far again, and you will know when Senbi, the scribe of the Royal Records, lived in Egypt.’

‘Aw, come off! That box ain’t that old. It can’t be. Why did n’t it get busted? Why ain’t it dust?’

Tony’s voice, and a face like a Greek phalanx, features all firmly locked into an expression of incredulity, confront the assistant. She hopes Tony feels as young as he looks when she is through, and that he is somewhat subdued after a half hour as near as she can put him to the ‘shadow of the Sphinx’ and the Pyramid of Khafre — those structures which caused to grow up around their builders that favorite proverb of Emerson’s: ‘It is the strength of the Egyptians to sit still.’ Tony feels that his strength lies, not in sitting still, but far in its polar opposite. He is sent off to the park, to exercise that strength in his chosen direction.

His friend Abe, grave with a heritage of desert wanderings, accepts antiquity unquestioningly — a strange contrast to Nick and Tony. He lingers quietly, on the whole, over the ornaments of the people who subjugated his forefathers and who worshipped strange gods. The oldness of things falls naturally into the current of his thinking. His adherence to his own traditions was never more apparent than on one luckless day, when the assistant took an unlabeled group into the room of Italian primitives. She stood contemplative before a favorite Baldovinetti, a delicate head, fair and virginal, against a dark background in which there is a stiff angel. A piercing silence interrupted her musing. A frozen wall of prejudice gripped her. She passed quickly into the ‘French Room.’ That awful quiet had told her that unknowingly she had brought the ’little citizens’ of G— synagogue district into a room of Italian church paintings!

‘It is well to know one’s groups,’said the head of the Children’s Museum. It is! Still, they make themselves known fairly soon, if one does not happen to be informed in advance, as ‘we all should be.’

Abe of the patriarchal mind is a friend of Tony’s, but Michael Cistone is ‘his bright particular star.’ Michael was in the ‘talented children’s drawingclass’ on Saturday mornings. He has a job in the summer. He is fourteen.

Michael was conversing confidentially with the head of the Children’s Museum, at his side a friend of his who had lost two fingers from his left hand at the ‘Commercial Electric Factory’ the week before, and Tony at his heels.

Introducing his bonhomme, Michael said: ‘My friend is also a painter.’

The Head was impressed.

‘How about the “job,” Michael?'

‘All right, but the men told me not to draw the “boss.” I did n’t. I draw everyone else, noon hours. The watchman’s always eatin’ fish. I draws him eatin’ fish. Since then I draws all the time I can get off. After while the boss sees one of my drawings, and calls me in. The boss, he’s little. He’s got little tiny bit-ty eyes, — most meet across his nose, — and big ovalish, round cheeks.’ Michael at this point makes an expansive fat sausage gesture with arms widespread. ‘And in the middle of his face there sprouts up a little moustache. He’s awful funny. He says: “Such a talented boy in my factory. I will see that he gets a scholarship. To-morrow he shall go with me to the Art School in my automobile.” ’

Tony, bursting with excitement, —

‘Did you go, Michael, did you go?’

‘ I comes to work in my best clothes the next morning. I works all day in my best clothes. The boss can’t see me. I, right under his nose twice, I am not there at all. At night I walks home. My clothes is all dusty and two greasespots. I guess I get that scholarship somewhere else.'

‘What on earth does this card on your desk mean?’ said the assistant to the Head, reading: ‘ “Mr. X—, Art School on Little Wonder Tack.” Why Mr. X&emdah; on Little Wonder Tack?’

‘Oh,’ somewhat absently, ‘Little Wonder Tack factory is where Michael works. That card is to remind me to set Mr. X—to work on his “boss” for a scholarship for Michael. The man can’t deceive the child like that without paying something for it.'

Yesterday the assistant was standing before a Monet, which had been rehung after a long absence from the gallery. Fleeting blue mist is over a landscape colored like a peach-blossom. A house in the foreground is transfigured by Spring and Monet.

‘Say, teacher, is that there picture painted by hand?’ inquires Tony.

Probably there could be no keener comment on the machine-loaded horizon of the average child in America. We, of even a generation earlier, could hardly conceive of Monet paintings coming from a shoot, sixty per minute, like Ivory Soap bars, or Shredded Wheat Biscuit. Some such idea was obviously Tony’s. Descriptions of paints, palettes, and preliminary sketches may have some effect in clearing up his ideas.

Still, it is rather doubtful. The machines are so ever-present. He has never seen a painter at his easel; and to connect the work of the great impressionist with his own drawing is quite a mental skip.

Russia, Africa, Czechoslovakia, Bohemia, Poland, quiet and full of craft interest, all are companions of Tony. In short, over the tables in the Children’s Museum, our democracy is at work. In drawing a butterfly or a Persian textile, distinctions of social strata are erased. Tony is arm-in-arm with what might be Uncle Remus’s little brother; and his head is perilously close to — ‘Do you see that blond child in the velvet coat? Her father become a life member Monday.’

What does it mean to Tony? what is coming to him out of it all? the assistant wonders. He is so grimy at times that one would like to close all introductions to the world of æsthetics, and put him in hot water and ’let the Gold Dust Twins do the work.’ What are the jewels of India and woodcuts of Japan going to add to his life, to-day, to-morrow, and in twenty years? There is a possibility that Tony may some day show talent, and reach the Art School, like Michael or Abe. But, judging from present indications, this will not happen.

Undoubtedly China, India, Greece, will be more than pink, green, or yellow spots on the map to Tony, when he studies geography. They will be centres which produce objects that enchant him, if one may judge from his continuous presence near those objects in the Museum.

When he digs ditches, or works in any other immigrant fashion for his bread, China will seem remote, and the current of human progress will vanish in his own race for bread.

But if he comes to the Museum now, every day, one can but believe that a sensitiveness to beauty must result; he will be so well ‘ initiated into new experiences ’ of perception, that he will stay awake.

What the assistant wants to do for Tony is to deepen, and widen, and crystallize that love of ‘de blue and de shine of it,’so that even the blackness of the steel mill will be penetrated, and the monotony lessened in the ditch.