Approximate Distance

Fiction, Max Blue

I first read about the painter Victor Ambrose nearly ten years ago, sitting beneath the courtyard eaves of the Mission-style building that housed the small university I attended in the heart of the unfathomable city where I spent the twilight years of my adolescence, knees drawn up to my chest, absorbed in a thousand-page fiction, as rain fell obliquely into the nearby fountain. The mention of Ambrose was brief, and because of the context in which it appeared, I assumed the name to be a product of the author’s imagination. I can no longer remember the title of that novel, nor the author’s name, only that, with a certainty, Ambrose’s name was mentioned alongside a summary of one of his paintings. Which painting, though, is another detail that now evades my memory.

My surprise when, on vacation last winter, in a city I had never visited before, I discovered a small room in the Eastern wing of a museum which was dedicated wholly to Victor Ambrose’s work. In the moment I glimpsed his name at the top of the brief biographical text near the doorway, I had the strange sensation of experiencing my real life and a work of fiction, my own past and my uncertain present, all in an instant. It had been raining when I boarded an airplane in one city that morning, and raining also in the city where my plane landed, so as to create the illusion that the world was somehow smaller than the five- or six-hour flight would seem to evidence. I couldn’t help but think that not only did these meteorological conditions create an illusory proximity between the two cities, but that it was in fact the very same rain that had been falling on me when I left one place that fell on me now as I arrived in another. The idea that every rain is the same rain, that the drops are in fact not infinitely different and individual, like snowflakes, but rather monotonously identical in their militant onslaught, is a thought that has plagued me all my life. So it occurred to me that the rain falling beyond the single, large window in that room of the museum was the same rain that had been falling beyond the eaves over two decades ago, on the afternoon that I sat reading in the university courtyard.

It so happens that events from personal memory and history seem to converge upon us in the present with the force of great coincidence, but the immensity of this phenomenon is, in part, an illusion: Someone had to experience the connection between that novel and this room – it is likely that I am only one of several people who have. There are too many people in the world, only so many painters in history, only so many novels one could have read. But then and there, in that small room, surrounded by those eleven paintings, I allowed myself to forget the likelihood of coincidence, giving myself over the staggering sensation of awe at my discovery. I felt myself taken up by the notion that I had been moving toward this moment all my life (which is also true, but again, not in the way we tend to experience the phenomenon), and that, by discovering that Ambrose was real, I was, finally, completing a moment begun long ago; time returning like a thread looping through adjacent holes in the same bolt of fabric.

Below the painter’s name, the paragraph of text on the wall provided some biographical information and some curatorial conjecture. Ambrose had been born in Burgundy, or somewhere nearby, the plaque told me, in 1917, and died in New York City in 1995. In the years between, he is known to have lived in various cities across South America and England, and passed through many other European cities and towns, and a few others in the Americas. Ambrose studied at Les Beaux Arts de Paris between 1935 and 1938 and had a successful early career, which came to a sudden end in 1940, when he fled the city shortly before the German occupation, leaving behind all of his small paintings save for two, which he must have managed to fit at the bottom of his suitcase. He never married, never fathered any children (at least none of whom there is any record), and had very few known friends in the arts, other than the esteemed Mexican poet Mira Gaspar (b.1922), who, at the time of the painter’s death, assumed responsibility for what little of Ambrose’s work is known to exist: The eleven canvases that comprised the contents of the room in which I stood, gifted to the museum by Gaspar herself, shortly before her own passing in 2002, in the interest of their preservation.

Ambrose’s oeuvre, the plaque continued (I am writing this from memory), primarily concerned natural landscapes. His travels had been field expeditions, chronicling the relationship between the natural world and humans’ effects on the land, from architectural interventions to the destruction brought on by the Second World War. Ambrose’s other primary interest was Gaspar. According to her diaries, Ambrose had painted Gaspar dozens of times in the year 1939, during a prolonged stay in Mexico City, though only one painting from that year was known to still exist.

There was a photograph of Ambrose beside this wall text, a handsome headshot of the painter that looked like it might once have served as a passport photograph. It was disturbing, meeting him face to face for the first time, so long after our brief encounter in the pages of a fiction years before. I had imagined him to be – well, seeing his face in the photograph completely erased any imagined version of him from my memory, replacing it now with his smiling, soft-eyed countenance. Perhaps I had imagined myself, or some version of myself, playing the role of Ambrose in the theater of my mind. But no, it was not me who Ambrose resembled but a young Franz Kafka – or at least the definitive picture of the author, in which only the hint of a shy smile plays on his thin lips, a watery shimmer in his boyish eyes, and, of course, his famously large ears.

It occurred to me then how Gaspar was much like the Max Brod to Ambrose’s Kafka, the friend and confidante entrusted with the artist’s legacy. I wondered what Ambrose’s instructions to Gaspar had been, if any, and if Gaspar had carried them out faithfully or acted against them by gifting this small collection of paintings to the museum. I realized, also, that whatever was known to be factual about Ambrose had likely been taken from Gaspar’s diaries and recollections on faith alone: In Ambrose’s absence, it was Gaspar’s story, her version of events, that made up the definitive history of Victor Ambrose.

But reading a text, like looking at a painting, can tell you only so much about an artist anyway. The rest comes from reading the work itself. I draw the comparison to literature intentionally: Writing and painting both are practices of meditation and accumulation, of time passing. The writer builds his work word by word; the painter stroke by stroke. On the face of it, the major difference is in how writing and painting are experienced by their audiences: A piece of writing unfolds, as it is created, word by word, while a painting can be grasped at a glance. But a piece of writing can also be summarized and a painting examined for each stroke, expanding the more one looks. It is effectively a matter of letting your mind run away.

The first, Vol D’hiver [Winter Flight], dated c.1939, no larger than seven or eight inches tall by one foot wide, shows a snowdrift, a wiry, black tree bare of any foliage, a dark bird in flight against the white sky – all of which is rendered in perhaps a dozen strokes. The extent of what Ambrose manages to get across with only a few marks reminds me of the Chinese brush painters who painted around the empty space within their compositions, who considered making a mark to be just as meaningful as not making one. How much visual information they were able to communicate using absence. The snowdrift here was like this: nothing but an untouched expanse of primed canvas to communicate the accumulation of snow, the lack of distinction between the drift and the white sky. The way the trunk of the tree fell away into nothingness was enough to express the mounting around it, covering, one could imagine, all the grass and rocks that populated the field in every other season, perhaps covering even a low stone wall that ran through the field or, depending on the height of the drift, even obscuring other, smaller trees. I wondered at this being the first painting in the small exhibition, and how apt it was for that to be an image of departure. It struck me that the bird was like a soul departing, a brave and singular figure embarking into some expanse of emptiness. This can be partially credited as a curatorial choice, but also appreciated for being the earliest painting of Ambrose’s known to exist, and that it was one of two the artist had taken with him when he fled Paris. In this way, it was a curatorial choice that predated the actual curation of the exhibition, a carefully made selection, I would like to imagine, on Ambrose’s own part. Fleeing Paris, he was stepping into the great unknown and would take with him this painting that might act something like a talisman, an allegory for his very own predicament. I imagined him looking around his studio frantically, the sound of shelling in the streets outside, air raids, the scent of gunpowder, rainfall, stuffing a few materials close at hand into a duffel bag. I’m sure it wasn’t like that at all, though. As the plaque had told me, Ambrose escaped Paris before the occupation. Had war, as I imagined it, even come to Paris? In revision, I imagine Ambrose preparing to flee Paris amid whispers of the Nazi approach. I see him packing a satchel in a hurry, by candlelight.

After he had painted Winter Flight and before the occupation, however, a younger Ambrose had been a student in the city, broadening and refining his practice. The only other painting on display made before the war was one that I guessed to be a study from his school days, the simple still life, Citrons [Lemons], dated c.1936, showing a ceramic pitcher and three lemons on a blue tablecloth. This painting, too, is quite small, roughly ten inches square. Although it has a certain quality that transcends academic drudge work, the composition is uninspired and the technical perfection of the piece perfunctory. It stands out as the most distinctly realist work on display in the gallery, another reason I thought it was probably nothing more than a simple academic exercise. Why bring it with him when he left Paris, then? One possible explanation that sprang to mind was that Ambrose had intended to use it as a sort of advertisement when he wanted to ply his trade, as an example of the kind of technique, though not his usual style, that he was capable of producing work in.

I wondered about the other paintings Ambrose had made in Paris: at the university, for exhibitions at galleries in the city, for patrons. Many, I understood, had found homes with collectors and were, at least presently, unaccounted for. But mustn’t he have left some more paintings behind in his studio, or his living quarters, or wherever it was he had worked? Some unfinished, some completed? How many Ambrose paintings existed out there, signed and dated prior to 1940, as yet undiscovered? I imagined a fragile cityscape leaning against a basement door somewhere, beside boxes and wooden furniture with moth eaten upholstery, or hanging on a living room wall, passed down through generations with no knowledge of the man who had once possessed the delicately scrawled signature, scratched into the impasto of each canvas with what I imagined was the back of a brush, a distinct A and a looping, cursive -mbrose, barely legible. I wondered if the owner of that painting ever wondered about the hand that had so marked the canvas hanging on their living room wall or above their bed or in the hallway facing the door, which they looked at day after day, if only glancing at it briefly, or, on certain rainy or sunlit afternoons, meditating on it for hours at a time.

Now I stood before the one extant painting of Ambrose’s Mexican muse, Poétesse Mexique [The Mexican Poet], 1943, two feet tall by a foot-and-a-half wide. It is a simple painting, the nude Mira seated on a chair, ankles crossed, leaning one elbow on the corner of a table, a vase of orange flowers at its center. The setting might be a kitchen or living room. Mira’s hair is cut in a sort of bob, or perhaps it is pinned back; Ambrose’s style makes it difficult to tell. The palette is limited, as I am beginning to understand, was a definitive part of Ambrose’s style, narrowing the world into less than five shades of color, as few brushstrokes as possible, the smallest necessary surface area of canvas to contain what he sought to capture, always reducing, reducing, reducing, his paintings to glimpses, flashes of vision contained. Like a writer, Ambrose had selected the elements of each scene he thought necessary to preserve in order to convey just enough of what he saw, the feeling that looking at that thing evoked in him. The details and how they are rendered don’t show me the nude woman sitting in the corner of a room in Mexico City – instead, the canvas is laden with Ambrose’s experience of the moment, of what it felt like to sit with her. I imagine him looking at her, in this ambiguous room, the quality of thin light that he translated into paint like that. I want to know the temperature in that room, then, in that moment, though I’d guess quite cool, based on the wash of blue. Or was blue the feeling of painting her?

The way someone’s presence can make us sad for the inevitable future in which we are apart from them. Or maybe that wistfulness is particular to Mexico City that time of year – what time of year was it, I wonder? I imagine the painting made at twilight, at dusk, during Picasso’s l'heure bleue, the blue hour when the sun is below the horizon, and the world is cast in a cool pall of shadowless shades of navy. And if the painting was painted then, in the late afternoon or early evening hours, where had Mira come from, what had filled her day until the moment when she stepped into the artist’s room and disrobed and sat and held the pose while his eyes traced lines along the contours of her body, like a mountain range a sunset (it occurs to me that landscape painting is born of the desire to paint the nude form, in its absence). Had she sat for another artist, in a studio more or less impressive than Ambrose’s cramped quarters, in a building across the city, perhaps for a class of students at the Academia de San Carlos, where, it occurred to me, Diego Rivera had studied thirty-five years before Ambrose arrived in the Americas. Or did she make a sufficient living from her poetry, publishing, and giving readings? Perhaps this painting was made late at night, after an evening of carousing with the academic crowd she frequented, at some dingy café that reminded Ambrose of Paris, listening to them recite new and favorite poems in Spanish. Or else I imagine the painting made at dawn, before the sun had a chance to break over the tops of the neighboring buildings, to infiltrate the interior of the apartment where artist and model sat in quiet company, before the light could have its harsh way with the room, exposing the thin layer of dust on the floorboards, the tabletop, the grease stains on the wallpaper, the air threatening warmth enough for Mira to sit comfortably in the nude. I imagine them rising from bed together, after a rash of early hours spent making love. He is nearly able to span her waist with both hands. His surprise at discovering that her body exists in the round – he has been feeling the world through painting, and painting alone, too much lately. He notices, when she sits down afterward, for him to paint her, a smudge of ochre staining her rib, where his painter’s hands had, in the night, caressed her. I want to know what he was saying, what she was saying, words on lips. I imagine them talking sleepily while they worked, Mira speaking softly so as not to disturb her posture, Ambrose muttering distractedly. I imagine she speaks with a poet’s gentle cadence, he with a gruff staccato. In Spanish? In French? In English? Either way, at least one of them was compromising a little bit of their ability to communicate, to understand. They understood each other best in the physical sense, I think, when they reduced each other to bodies, to shapes and temperature. I imagine Ambrose asking her to cross her ankles just so, to turn her foot a little bit outward to expose the arch, the curve of her calf. I imagine her pretending not to understand, even when she did, because there is pleasure in being asked. There is the chance he will lay down his brush and cross the room to reposition her himself, his rough hands handling her gently. The ocher stain she won’t wash. Maybe that’s all the stain was – a turn of her torso toward the flower vase. Perhaps Ambrose only ever touched her in a directorial capacity.

The text on the wall told me that Ambrose painted Mira several times, filling sketchbooks with her image. Perhaps Ambrose had developed a following in Mexico; maybe Mira’s own following had created a demand for his pictures of her. Or perhaps her following had been a reason for him not to exhibit these portraits. It is unimaginable, in the United States, for a literary figure to attain the level of fame available to poets in South America or Europe. And he was probably still travelling light, likely forced to sell everything he made in one place in order to pay his way on to the next. But he had kept this one, something to remember her by.

In 1945, Ambrose returned to Europe with, as the paintings on the wall evidenced, the express intention of documenting the landscape in the aftermath of the war. If a body was like a landscape, then a landscape, too, was like a body: it could change and age and a portrait could tell its story. All five of the paintings from 1946 to 1948 are untitled, and yet, in that way, all of them share one title, all collected under the umbrella of the unspeakable effect of the ravished land.

The first of these paintings is reminiscent, in its sparseness, of the first painting in the gallery. In only a few strokes, Ambrose shows the hillock in the countryside, the low wall of stone or brick. Had it been blasted by shelling or eroded naturally? And was that not the exact question Ambrose meant to pose? As in Winter Flight, much of the unprimed canvas here has been left empty, the structure of that which he had filled in lending form to the emptiness – a low rise of earth in the foreground, a cloudbank in the background. It struck me that his particular, vague stylings lent themselves to conveying so well the eerie flicker of memory; the way in which a thing remembered is always partial, and how that partiality invites us to fill in the absent details with even fainter strokes.

The next painting shows a modest church in the square of some European village. It reminded me of the churches and villages I had come across one after another when, as a young man, I had spent a summer travelling throughout the German and French countryside with nothing but a duffel bag containing three changes of clothing, a notebook, and a camera. Ambrose’s rendering is spare, carved delicately into a thick chiaroscuro to emulate the masonry of the church. I imagine Ambrose travelling through the countryside as I had done, perhaps even passing through the very same towns, sleeping nights underneath the very same roofs, sitting in the same squares. Again and again throughout that trip, I had been captivated by the long history of Europe, the feeling that I was moving through urban

spaces that had remained much the same for far longer than any had in the United States, that the particular cobblestones that dotted city centers had been laid hundreds of years before I ever set foot upon on them and that, when I did, the sole of my shoe met those of a thousand other souls who had stepped on that same stone throughout the centuries, like the tide beating endlessly against a cliffside. This, I thought, was somehow like painting, too, the way the artist builds the world on the canvas stroke after stroke, the way looking at a painting is to look at the direct result of someone else’s extended act of looking, retreading the past with one’s eyes.

My most distinctive memories from that trip were Latin mass and springerle cookie – the cookie like my own Proustian madeleine. I had attended mass in a countryside town in Germany and that same afternoon eaten one of those anise cookies with a cup of hot black tea in a small café, thinking about the sermon, of which I had not understood a single word, and chewing the crumbly, aromatic treat, slowly winding back the film in my camera, before popping open the back of the machine and labelling the roll with the date and the name of the town, before loading a new roll. I had taken dozens of photographs while in Europe, endlessly documenting my surroundings as if—had I not captured the landscape, architecture, and people on the thirty-five-millimeter film inside my little point-and-shoot camera—none of it would have really existed. It was a way for me to make it real, by freezing it somewhere in time so that I would always be able to return at a whim, not just to Europe, but to Europe exactly as it had been when I was there, as I possessed it. I wanted to forget nothing, or forget as little as possible. But it so happened, because I was incapable of photographing everything down to the smallest detail, that I forgot almost everything other than what I did photograph, and those photographs came to stand in for the memories I might have made. In trying to preserve the authentic, fragile thing, I had replaced it with an opaque copy.

The next painting showed a field of wildflowers rendered in clusters of colorful dots, but I lingered on one bunch of blackish purple points that was like a bruise against the pale, golden flesh of the underpainting. Looking at it made me think of a girlfriend I once had who suffered from – or was blessed with? – synesthesia, who felt a strong emotional response to certain colors or, rather, felt that each emotion possessed a corollary color. Numbers, too, were, for her, connected to both a color and an emotion. And so I wondered, looking at this nearly black mark on Ambrose’s canvas, if a certain sort of synesthesia could be attributed to painters, too, in their use of colors to convey the way the world had touched them, the way looking at a landscape made them feel? What else was painting – representing the world in a selected palette of colors – other than imbuing those colors with a meaning all one’s own? And was it of any significance that Ambrose used color itself so sparingly when he painted? What significance had been ascribed to the vast swaths of unprimed, grey or tan canvas, the colorlessness threatening to swallow the pigment placed upon it?

All the rest of the paintings Ambrose had made in the European countryside followed similar form, and I passed over them lightly. Only one more, the last, caught and held my attention longer than a few seconds: a pastoral picture of a field of hay bales. Instantly, my mind was cast to the similar paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, and countless other plein air painters who had once worked in the French countryside. Even I had photographed one such field of wheat on my travels through Europe, thinking, when I did so, of those same painters, the taking of the photograph a quiet gesture toward the history of French painting I so admired. I wondered, examining Ambrose’s installment in this long legacy, if he, too, had possessed an almost-ironic awareness of the significance of his decision to paint the scene so many before him had painted. If, after all, his object was to document Europe in the wake of the war, then he must have considered Monet and Van Gogh’s chronological positions. Van Gogh’s entry: 1889; Monet’s: 1890-1891. It was as if all these paintings – Van Gogh’s, Monet’s, Ambrose’s – had become a triptych executed in collaboration by three painters, a documentation not only of the effect of light on bales of wheat, but also the effect of time on the docile land. And weren’t time and light, essentially, the same thing? Surely, I thought, Ambrose must have intended this commentary on Van Gogh and Monet, but also on so many other things: painting, light, time, history, war, nature. There was something in there, too, about how nature might even heal the wounds of war, how its cyclicality might return the land to the time before its ravishment.

There were only two paintings remaining in the gallery: one was a small study; the other, the largest canvas in the room. Both had been made much, much later than the rest, and I wondered at the gap between Ambrose’s travels in Europe and the execution of these two canvases in New York City, a stretch of time—nearly fifty years—that was unaccounted for in the accompanying wall text, save for a mention of his return to Mexico (to Mira?) before settling, finally, on Manhattan.

The untitled study, dated 1995, appears to be an unfinished rendering (but who can say?) of a vase of wilted flowers on a tabletop. It showed far more unprimed canvas than pigment, and the pigment had been applied even more spottily than was Ambrose’s usual style. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to assume that, at the age of seventy-three, Ambrose was thinking about death. Perhaps he was feeling some physical evidence of its creep—failing memory, failing eyesight, arthritis—though I am not inclined to attribute this painting’s sparsity to any mere physical or mental ailment. Instead, I feel strongly that the unfinished appearance is some sort of comment on the painter’s age, on the nature of life itself as a sort of unfinished study, a prolonged examination never fully realized. How does one approach their work with the knowledge of death looming? And then, correcting myself: every artist must know that death is looming from the day they are born. Making art, in the first place, strikes me as an act of petulant resistance to the knowledge of one’s own inevitable death. It is the need for one to claim their place in history, to graffiti on the wall of time. Throughout his life, then, was Ambrose not merely insisting upon his own existence, his own being, his observations on history and time secondary to the need to confirm himself in oil paints? But it was not the last canvas Ambrose committed himself to at the end of his life, which made me think, on the other hand, that sometimes an unfinished study is just an unfinished study —although reading (even, or especially, too deeply) into an artwork is, of course, one of the pastime’s greatest pleasures. 

The final, large canvas in the gallery, Ambrose’s final known work and, I imagine, his last, given that it is dated the same year he died (1999), is titled Hush en Gris Chine [Hush in Heather Grey]. This painting bears some vague similarity to the first painting in the gallery, insofar as it also shows an overcast day, except that here the scene is a New York City street corner. This was the only cityscape in the entire exhibition and only one of three paintings to show a building, let alone several of them. The angle of the scene, elevated from street-level perhaps four or five stories, strikes me as the view from an apartment window looking down over a block in what might be the Upper West Side. Of all the paintings in the gallery, this one is the largest and most densely layered, the canvas probably holding more paint, it occurred to me, than nearly all of the other canvases in the room combined. It is

also the most loaded with visual information, the most detailed—the most burdened. I had become accustomed, in the hour or so I had spent in that small room, to Ambrose’s particular brand of lightness with his subjects, the way he conveyed everything in as few strokes as possible, the economy of his brushwork seeming to speak to a way of being toward the world that the man himself possessed: just passing through, sidestepping the mire of modern life and using painting to maintain his distance, elevated above the world. And this painting conveyed all that much more literally: the view of the city from a removed vantage point, the layering of the paint seeming itself to be about painting, meant, especially in contrast to Ambrose’s other work, drawing attention to itself in order to state clearly that, for Ambrose, the world was always the world as seen through painting; the world as paint. The buildings look heavy, everything shades of grey — lavender, blue, taupe, but all greys — and the avenue below, vanishing somewhere near the top of the composition, fades with the petering out of a brushstroke into the only segment of unprimed canvas visible, an odd, segmented shape of negative space: a triangle between the vanishing points, the roof of the building in the foreground, and the row of buildings crowding the upper right corner of the canvas. The traffic lights up and down the avenue burst against the drab color palette, like the wildflowers from the earlier canvas, in pocks of red and green, communicating more directly than the dark tone of the rest of the painting, I thought, how dreary a scene Ambrose intended to set. I imagine him in his apartment, or his studio, perhaps, the canvas set at a slight angle to the window, light falling across it at an angle, the painter’s heavy body resigned to the uncomfortable but familiar embrace of an old armchair, badly in need of being reupholstered, as he worked at the canvas with a long brush, relishing in the distance between himself and his painting, himself and his subject, like the distance required for that subject to travel through him, onto the canvas: A man removed, circling from a bird’s eye view.

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Max Blue has contributed art criticism and reporting to BOMB, Cultured Magazine and Hyperallergic, among others, and he is a regular columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. His short fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. You can follow him on Substack.