Chez Max Read Free

round this place.’ And I indicated the room where we were sitting. ‘This is my restaurant, I designed it myself, and what do you see on the walls?’
    Leon briefly examined the pictures to left and right, framed posters of works by Matisse and Cézanne, and then looked at me incredulously for a moment.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said then, nodded at me, and smiled faintly. ‘Well, thanks.’
    I almost said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ purely as a reflex.
    â€˜I know my opinions aren’t particularly…’
    â€˜That’s all right,’ Leon interrupted me. ‘Sorry.’ After a moment he added, ‘And I’ve always said that’s what art is all about.’ Without looking up, he gestured vaguely from the posters to me. ‘But probably I’m just one of the many who are secretly pining to be famous in the colour supplements for fountains running with piss and all that.’
    I had no idea what Leon was talking about. Once again I looked at his profile and didn’t move a muscle myself. Not for fear of saying something wrong this time, however, but out of respect. Obviously Leon was fighting his own inner demons.
    After a while I asked, ‘So how did those six months go?’
    Leon looked up as if he wasn’t sure where he was. ‘What?’
    â€˜The six months Junowicz & Kleber gave you to paint their series – what did you do?’
    â€˜Oh, that.’ Leon picked up his glass of wine and drained it. As he poured more, he said, ‘After a month I stopped drinking, just like that, not another drop and then…’ he smiled sardonically, ‘then I reinvented myself. Painted my fruit as if painting fruit was the biggest joke in the world. Exaggerated the colours until they were sheer kitsch, put the fruit in rubbish bins or on paintings in galleries with visitors eating the fruit off the canvas, that sort of thing. I still had this mental picture of myself sitting with the Junowicz & Kleber people in the room behind the gallery, drinking champagne and making brilliant conversation. In my mind I was already so famous, my work was so highly thought of, that it struck me as extremely clever to make fun of my own stuff.’
    He paused, and I took my chance to say quickly, ‘Well, I can imagine it was very funny to have people eating the fruit.’
    â€˜Yes, exactly,’ agreed Leon, nodding slightly, and I couldn’t guess from his expression just how he really meant his ‘Yes, exactly’. Then he added, ‘But that doesn’t matter. After another month I came to, and then I finally began working properly.’
    Leon stopped and took a deep breath, as if he had to steel himself before he went on. ‘And it worked. They wanted twenty pictures, three weeks later I had the first ten finished, and if I’m not much mistaken they were the best still lifes I ever painted. It was as if I had new eyes, as if I were suddenly seeing strong, living, startling colours again, and the arrangements and perspectives were so easy, it all came as naturally as if there wasn’t any other way to put flowers or fruit down on the canvas. Friends who came to my studio couldn’t take their eyes off those pictures. As if the fruit on my canvas had more juice in it, more magic about it, than the real fruit in their kitchens. Or as if my pictures showed them, for the first time, what marvels Nature or God or whatever you like to call it creates. I had the feeling I’d found my way to the heart of it all. My pictures were the truth. So yes, they were only fruit and flowers, but the good Lord didn’t start out with human desperation or couples locked in amorous frenzy, he began with single-cell organisms and photosynthesis – fish and leaves.’
    For a moment Leon looked as if his words were little living creatures and he was watching them go, waiting expectantly to see if they’d be walking upright after