Behind the Curtain

CONTENT WARNING - mentions of suicide, suicidal ideation and depression.

TRAGIC PASSING OF ARTIST ELIAS WHITMAN LEAVES HIS FINAL WORK TO BE AUCTIONED

Critics often described the great Elias Whitman as this century’s greatest visionary. His work frequently drew comparisons to Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Leonardo da Vinci due to Whitman’s extraordinary understanding of color theory. His own agent described Whitman as having had the eyes of a butterfly - able to see billions of hues left unheeded by the regular human eye. Due to this remarkable talent, Whitman lived an incredibly successful (albeit short) life of forty-three years, having painted thirty-eight recorded masterpieces. Or, his agent says, thirty-nine.

To the dismay of the art world, Whitman abruptly refused to paint as he turned forty. He claimed to the media that he couldn’t bear to spend another second of his life holding a paintbrush. Whitman reportedly said that “art imitates life, but if you put all of the feelings harvested from life into your art, you cease living at all.” Despite this, one of the last things that Whitman ever did was paint. He finished his final work a mere hour before his self-inflicted death at age forty-three.

Given the prices bestowed upon his previous works, Whitman’s final piece is expected to fetch more than $22 million at auction. His agent says, “Elias was one of a kind. He lived his life like nobody else was watching, despite the millions who were. He held up a magnifying glass to the human experience and painted what he saw in devastating detail. He has left this final piece of him to the world as an inheritance. It is more than just a singular painting; it is a culmination of everything he saw, everything he painted and every day he lived. As his lifelong friend, I am honored to have the opportunity to present it to the world in the upcoming auction. I wholeheartedly believe discerning collectors will recognize it for what it is: the kind of masterpiece that defines the legacy of its maker and cements it into history.”

The painting, still untitled and undisclosed to the public, is expected to sell for a record-breaking sum at the auction next week.

Last spring, I got a phone call. It was from a man who claimed to be the agent of a very famous artist. An artist who refused to paint. He said he would pay me anything to get his artist to paint again. I was confused at first, just holding the phone up to my ear and hearing him ramble on and on about how his artist was so depressed he refused to even look at a paintbrush. How he was so reclusive, he would forego bathing for weeks at a time. How the curtains in his apartment were always closed. How skinny and pale he was becoming.

Eventually, I couldn’t help but say yes, if only to assuage my curiosity. Of course, I also made it clear that my goal wouldn’t be to have him paint again; it would be to have him take care of himself. The agent wasn’t surprised by that. He just chuckled and said, “Of course.” Looking back, I wonder if he knew what would happen.

The agent drove Elias to his first session with me. I remember being wary of how calm Elias was, although his agent had booked the session behind his back. If anything, he seemed amused. I remember wondering if this was truly the man who had been described to me over the phone. This man didn’t seem reclusive; he just looked like his mind was in two places at once, both with me and beyond me. He was thin and pale, sure, but he was clean and wearing a very slight cologne. He was the sort of man you could walk past without noticing, but if he spoke to you, you’d remember what he said, whether you wanted to or not, no matter how inconsequential it was. I never realized why then, but now I wonder if he had that effect on me because of how impermanent he was, how little commitment he had to reality.

On the day of our first session, I met him outside the door of my office. He was there with his agent, who quickly shook my hand, patted Elias on the back and said he’d wait outside. We were alone, so we shook hands, said our pleasantries, and I opened the door to my office and invited him in. Soon, I sat down on my armchair and directed him to the sofa opposite. Everything in my office was a shade of beige, gray or blue. As he sat down, his eyes swept over it and, as he confirmed there was nothing of interest in the room, he slouched against the back of the sofa and just looked at me, waiting for it to start. He was observing me as if I were the one all of this was about.

“Before we begin, I’d like to make it clear that everything you say in this room stays in this room.”

“Unless it becomes apparent that I’m a risk to myself or others. I’m aware.” He seemed unimpressed with my spiel, almost tired.

“Have you ever been to therapy before?”

“I went to grief counseling for a while when I was young. Nothing much.” He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. I wrote it down so we could cover the topic in a later session.

“Did it help you?” I asked this to gauge how he felt about therapy in general. I didn’t get much in response.

“As much as it could.”

I knew from then on that Elias Whitman was going to be a hard egg to crack. The people who are never entirely present always are. But I had youth, determination and years of training on my side. So I was going to do it.

“So what’s your goal?” He just blinks at me, unmoved. “What do you want to gain from therapy?”

He pauses, looks up at the ceiling to think, “Keith, my agent, wants me to start painting again.” I wrote that down.

“Is that what you want?”

“No, not really.” There was no passion in his voice as he said this. It didn’t sound like he was refusing to paint so much as he just didn’t want to. I wrote that down too.

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.” An artist with no passion for art. What does that type of person want?

“Should we leave finding a goal to a later session?”

“Sure.” He was unbothered, like it was of no consequence to him whether he had a goal or not.

“So, why did you stop painting?” This question was both out of curiosity and necessity. I needed to know what led to this decision so I could better understand Elias and why he decided to steer his life in this direction.

“I was painting instead of living.”

I tilted my head, “What do you mean?”

“My work was becoming the entirety of my life. My feelings went into my creations instead of my relationships. I devoted so much time to painting and so little to everything else. I lived my twenties and thirties in a trance, and when I woke up, I had no one left.” I wrote nearly everything he said down. It felt like a breakthrough compared to all of his other answers. It seemed like he was quite forthcoming when he wanted to be.

“So what have you been doing since you stopped?”

“Not much. Sleeping, eating, watching TV.” I realized immediately that we had stumbled onto the problem. Instead of finding anything to replace painting, he had just gone on to live as someone completely without purpose. I wrote it down.

“Why do you use different pens?”

I looked up at him, then down at my notes and up again, “Oh, this pen,” I held up the blue pen I was writing with, “is to show that you are replying in a more detached way, while this one,” I held up a red pen that I hadn’t touched yet, “is to show when you get emotionally charged or angry. It just helps me when I look over my notes, that’s all.”

“What about the white space in between the lines?” Surely he understood that I couldn’t control the white space? That’s just what you get when you write. But I couldn’t say that, right? It would sound much too crass to an artist.

“I suppose that represents when you’re silent. Like when I’m talking.” Elias nods, absorbs it. From then on, he didn’t speak much. But he listened. I could tell that from the way he looked at the pens I had on my coffee table.

I thought maybe that this was a positive development; learning how I was labeling his feelings might allow him to label them in turn and address them accordingly. In retrospect, maybe I was just giving him a palette.

I hardly remember the inquest itself, but I remember every second until they told me he was dead. The two harsh knocks at my door. Grabbing the dish towel to dry my hands before answering it. Being stunned when I saw the two police officers. Panicking, thinking, have I done something wrong? The feeling intensifying as they showed their badges, and I let them in. The relief as we sat in my living room and they told me I hadn’t done anything wrong. And then it happened.

“We’re just here for an inquest to clarify some things, gain some context. We need to ask some questions about Elias Whitman.”

An inquest can only mean one thing. I froze.

“An inquest? Elias is dead?”

The police officers look at each other and then at me. Then one of them nods. I can’t remember much past that. I excused myself to go and make tea that none of us drank. They asked me questions.

“Were there any signs?”

“No, he didn’t talk much; he was a quiet man. But when he did, he spoke of the world’s beauty. To him, stars were wishes coming true, clouds were animals, and sunrises were blessings. In his eyes, everything was bright and gorgeous. If there were signs, I would have seen them. I’m trained to do just that.”

I was defensive, but they didn’t argue. They just wrote things down. They asked about metaphors, session times, color theory. I told them how I used red, white and blue to color-code his responses in my notes, how he had asked about that in our first session. At that point in the inquest, I started crying. How hadn’t I seen the signs?

“Are you sure it was suicide? How?” I was grasping at straws at this point. I was knee-deep in denial.

“Quite sure, yes. Given how he was found, it’s very unlikely to be anything but suicide.” The officer looked briefly disturbed, as if she had been there herself.

“How so?”

“Well—” She looked uneasy, like she was about to say something she shouldn’t.

“I’m afraid we ought to be on our way now. Thank you for your help.” The other officer swiftly cut in, stopping his partner from saying too much.

As soon as they were out the door, I felt my chest burst outward, heaving with sobs. I couldn’t believe that Elias was gone. I had seen him the day prior… surely I would have seen the signs? He seemed healthy, content. Unless that was just what I wanted to think. With every passing second, that seems more and more the case.

In our last session, he was remarkably open. I remember making small talk with him as I grabbed my notepad. I asked what TV show he was watching, and he told me he preferred films; said they were less of a commitment. Over the year that I had been working with him, we had learned a lot about each other. I told him about my dog, and he told me about his decor preferences. I told him about my sister’s cancer diagnosis, and he told me how his mother passed when he was young. We were making progress. We were getting to know each other. And over time, he started trusting me more and more with his mind. Or, at least, that’s what I thought. Eventually, he got comfortable on the sofa, and we started.

“So how are you feeling lately?”

“Not much. I’ve felt so much over the years that my body feels numb now. You said red was rage? I feel like a white room with red stains.”

I remember smiling at that. I thought he was just buying into my terminology. I didn’t ask about the stains.

“Have you tried expressing how you feel? Perhaps in art? Artistic expression can be a form of release; it could relieve some of your tension.”

He went quiet. I thought he was just processing. I didn’t think about how much pressure his agent must have put on him. I didn’t think about how I was adding to that. I didn’t think to ask what painting was to him.

“I started sketching again recently. It’s just—I don’t know. Canvases feel a lot like coffins, y’know?”

I laughed at that. I thought he was being dramatic. I didn’t think to ask what he was sketching.

“That’s brave of you. Can I ask how you feel about painting again?”

“I’m nervous. When I paint, I start feeling like—like I don’t belong here. I don’t know. I might try…”

In that moment, I should have wondered why he felt that way about painting. I should have asked myself when he had become so uncertain. He used to be sturdy, content. Sure, he didn’t always know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. And I, just like his agent, refused to respect that.

I smiled, “Wow, Elias. That’s a big step to take. I’m proud of you for considering it.”

I still remember the smile he gave me after I said that. It failed to even reach his eyes. Yet it fooled me. I looked at his eyes and thought I saw them sparkle, when really they were glazing over. Those words are the worst that have ever left my mouth.

When I first saw the painting, I thought everyone else was crazy. I was in the crowd at the auction. I needed closure, and I had pushed for this; I was curious. I hoped that the painting would tell me why he was so reluctant, maybe why he took his own life. And then the staff took the cover off of it. Everyone gasped. People were wowing, clapping, whispering. As if Elias’s life was only worth the paint on that canvas. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry, I wanted to kneel on the ground and beg for his forgiveness. They kept calling it a masterpiece, but in reality, it’s a mirror. It’s an accusation. And it had my fingerprints all over it.

The bathroom is small, cramped. Claustrophobic. The tiles are white, perfectly drawn, symmetrical. It’s not pure or peaceful. It’s oppressive. It’s manufactured silence, censorship, erasure. It is imposed upon him. It hums with the voices of others, so that they may infiltrate the painting from inside. This is a type of silence that emerges from being talked over. It has the agent’s fingerprints all over it. The agent shushes him and magnifies the voices of others, talks his ear off about their critiques and his apparent failings. Talks about market rates, trending aesthetics, tries to make the artist conform to the norms. Doesn’t give him any space to speak, doesn’t give the room any space to echo. Any sound he makes is swallowed up by the white room, while each criticism he hears is fresh and new. That is the nature of a room without echoes. No matter how loud you scream, you won’t ever beat the combined voices of thousands of people without echoes.

Red stains the shower curtain, drips from the ceiling to the floor, and streaks the tiles. There’s even smears of it on the mirror. Still, it is far from chaotic. It’s deliberate. It is the red they talked about in the office, but not the kind that listens. It is red as performance, red as intrusion. Red as someone who is trying to help but does not ask if that is what you want. It’s everywhere, but it doesn’t serve a purpose. It never reaches the shadow behind the shower curtain. It just insulates him, like treatment began with no diagnosis and no consent.

The person beyond the shower curtain is barely there, blurred and blue. Blue as detachment, as withdrawal. As the final defense against being rewritten. He is hunched over, half as tall as he used to be. But still, he’s not hiding. He’s just trying to bear the weight of the criticisms, comply with the treatment that he didn’t ask for. Sometimes, when you are forced into silence and rage consumes you, detachment becomes a means of self-preservation.

Painting didn’t let him detach. It forced him to confront his problems. And she was one of them. He put his agent’s and his therapist’s fingerprints at the scene of his death, and nobody batted an eye. The painting isn’t a call for help. It is evidence of one that was left unanswered.

It sold for $35 million.