Three Lives

Joseph Goodale

As when on a rainy day, Yves Klein, according to John Yau, drove a new painting through the weather 

A few months ago, for example, I felt the urge to register the signs of atmospheric behavior by recording on canvas the instantaneous traces of spring showers, of south winds, and lightning. (Needless to say, the last-mentioned ended in a catastrophe.) For instance, a trip from Paris to Nice might have been a waste of time had I not spent it profitably recording the wind. I placed a canvas, freshly coated with paint, upon the roof of my white Citroen. As I zoomed down Route National 7 at the speed of 100 kilometers an hour, the heat, the cold, the light, the wind, and the rain all combined to age my canvas prematurely. At least thirty to forty years were condensed into a day.

(Yau, Further Adventures in Monochrome, 140)

So did I bring Sei Smith’s painting, Three Lives, with me on the train north from New York to Connecticut in March. The elegiac and very small painting was still wrapped up in my backpack and I had forgotten to take it out before leaving, so it stayed with me in the dining car of the train and in my aunt and uncle’s car when they picked me up from the station and in the hospital room where my grandmother was staying a few days before she died, where I saw her last. 

Three lives is a dark painting—its canvas, frame and backing board are all constructed out of wood and permanently attached to each other, so that the three elements are also one sculptural unit. It is clear that the frame is not separate from the painting at all, because it is also painted partly red on its black background. The painting is abstract but it is clear, I think, which way is up and that there are depicted three lives on a hill—either approaching or receding or stationary. Motion is not given. 

Similarly when my father was sick in 2002 Harriett brought over a painting that she had recently purchased on a trip and that she thought he might like, and he liked it a lot, my mom says. And we or she hung it in the bedroom. It may have hung on the wall opposite the bed by the dresser and the mirror, or to the right by the window and the fire-escape door, or by the arm-chair and the other window and the closet, or to the left by all the hospital equipment. And he died next to it, after which Harriett brought it away home with her, where I imagine she has it still, and must think about the fact that it had been at a death bed before it was in her house, and the funny remanence and provenance that that is, and that it may have registered the atmospheric behavior of the room, depending on how mystical or sentimental Harriett is—

Three lives has also now been at a death bed and must mean something for it. 

People care about previous owners and what happened near what, as when Gertrude Stein, as Alice B Toklas writes about a portrait by Cezanne, 

They put it in a cab and they went home with it. It was this picture that Alfy Maurer used to explain was finished and that you could tell that it was finished because it had a frame.

It was an important purchase because in looking and looking at this picture Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives.

(Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas)