Vandals, Ravage, and Ruin

Once upon a time I taught in a women's college where there was a policy of not hiring single male instructors (obviously in the days before discrimination policies).  I, who was recently widowed, was thus an exception, but there was also a studio art instructor, a single male, who was a last minute hire of desperation.  Outcasts, the both of us, we hung out together a lot, and as the months rolled by he painted a rather large formal portrait of me in oil, very much the grieving twenty five year old, replete with a black tie of mourning.  Years later, when it hung in the foyer of our departmental office at another university, where I was chair, more or less as a joke--the hang not my appointment--an abrasive bright New York Jewish lesbian (did I need the word abrasive?) who was a talented artist suggested that the work would be much improved if she added a representation of my current forty five year old bearded, flushed, and rounded face, as a doll head that the grieving youth would be holding in his hands.  This would be an allusion to a large collection of doll's heads that graced or deformed, take your pick, the mantelpiece in the conversational parlor of our baronial home.  I agreed, and she carried out her idea, but in doing so she made the head much larger so that in a sense it looked like the seated youth was holding the head of someone who had recently been guillotined.  It was unsettling, but to my mind it improved upon the placid aura of the original.  Years later a visiting artist friend from those long ago days of teaching together at the women's college was visiting and was horrified when she saw the portrait with the new head.  "That's vandalism," she exclaimed.  Luckily the original artist had died, though sad for him since it was way way too early, and I was freed of the necessity of having to explain or apologize to anyone.  But I have never forgotten her reaction, ever.  I somehow did not know or consider back then what is now commonplace, the idea that an artist always has a moral ownership of anything he/she has made.  Years later I was showing a very good Boston framer a group of Piranesi prints that needed re-matting since the paper or cardboard of the original mats had chemicals in them that were discoloring and damaging the actual print with which it had contact.  He was quoting me what would be a very substantial price for the work, and I was deliberating aloud whether or not I could afford this, to which he responded: "Well, so this set gets destroyed.  You know there is an awful lot of art in this world, and I guess it really wouldn't matter if some of it disappeared.  I can, as they say, nowadays, relate--well, in a way.  It's not that I feel the burden of the world's surplus art works, but having spent my life in study of Greek and Roman antiquity I am familiar with and comfortable with ruins.  Who would want to see the Parthenon whole, and tarted up with paint, like it was originally?  Who does not appreciate the rich vibrations one gets from reading the poems of Sappho which are so many of them, simply tantalizing fragments of the merest hint of ideas or images.  How breathtaking it is to walk into a Turkish village and find a temple growing out of the back of a stable, or rather really the stable having been added to the temple?  I love my grieving self, sweet, innocent, and full of promise, holding the impish bearded alcohol-flushed me of middle years.