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I have been asked to offer this recollection of Artemus Alford, whose reputation, impossible though it seems to me, grows still greater even after his death. The work of Mr. Alford is not widely distributed; he never had a major exhibition; no trendy New York gallery ever offered his canvas to a discriminating collector. In the tributes published in the last issue of this magazine, I observed nobody even claimed to have seen a painting in the flesh, as it were, of Mr. Alford's. He is known strictly from photographic reproductions, from his manifestos, or from analyses by others who also have seen none of his paintings. In addition to our long personal acquaintance, I have this additional qualification to discuss Mr. Alford's career: I own a painting of this mysterious artist.

This magazine has named me Mr. Alford's friend, and it is with some hesitation I accept this designation. Perhaps there exists no more precise equivalent. But it was not a warm friendship of equals. Rather I would say I was a Maecenas; Mr. Alford fulfilled the role of client artist, the Vergil or the Horace. Now after the death of Mr. Alford, (witness I retain the formality we used in our own conversation - now is no time to attribute to the relationship a false heartiness) and I have begun to be celebrated as a selfless patron, I am as indifferent to this new acclamation as I was inured to the cool diffidence I received from Mr. Alford himself.

But our relationship, of whatever sort it was, was of long duration: I first met Mr. Alford just under thirty years ago. I had just taken my M.S. at McGill, and had taken a job with IBM at their White Plains facility. I chose to live in the city, the city, of course, being New York. I had taken a nice, though small, apartment near Columbia. It was convenient because I was then at work on my MBA in the evening; it also suited my general temperament to be on Manhattan. For I was only just coming to the conclusion my career was not as an artist, that my skill in drafting, even coupled with intense desire, would not transform me into a painter. The only role left me, I felt, was as a patron; I may have been overeager to play it. I met Mr. Alford at a show of some second-rate New World Impressionists, and when Mr. Alford told me he was a painter, I asked to see some of his work. He showed visible reluctance; but in the face of my enthusiasm, he gave way, and we arranged a date late the following week. I have no doubt I was obnoxious and too persistent, though, naturally, I can no longer remember any details of our conversation.

Artemus Alford was a bowed man who dressed in shabby gray suits. Though he was five-foot-seven or so, his rounded body and stooped posture made him seem smaller. Already he wore thick glasses set in a plastic frame. His fingers were smudged with paints, but even in those days his palette tended to the blues and blacks, and so were often mistaken for inks. In fact, he looked like nothing so much as a very small-time, no doubt unsuccessful, accountant. His apartment-cum-studio, an unpleasant place in Yonkers, was not much of a surprise, given his appearance. It was sparsely furnished, but even with the few possessions it contained, it still managed to give the appearance of clutter. Papers, cheap paperbacks, laundry, dirty dishes lay scattered over the floor. On my arrival, I was first struck by the paucity of drawings. There was only one ink sketch on lined notebook paper tacked up in the kitchen.

There was also a painting, the painting I purchased. It was somewhat less than three feet wide, and about a foot and a half high. It was distinctly impressionist in technique, owing some to Monet, though more muted in its palette than that painter. It featured a woman in a garden. She stood to one side of the painting behind a wide bay window looking out upon a garden in full flower. She was in an uncomfortable posture, as if she were about to walk out of the frame of the picture, but with her head turned, as if there had been a noise in the garden. Some of the details have faded over the years: as far as I know no record of it exists anywhere except in my imperfect memory. I was impressed by the painting, and I wanted it immediately to begin my collection. Alford was unwilling to sell it, but I bid it up to a thousand dollars, a quite large sum in those days, and more than I could afford. I justified it to myself because it would be a form of assistance to a struggling artist, an artist I was sure would become significant. There could be no doubt he needed money, desperately: the state of his apartment made this point quite clearly. He first offered me coffee, then tea; and when he discovered he had neither, we settled for a minimally palatable red wine from Algeria, already opened and nearing vinegar. A glass apiece from chipped coffee cups emptied the bottle, and then we drank rusty tapwater.

I remember only a few things from that first meeting. One is I asked him about his painting to date, and as this was the only occasion on which I recall his having discussed his own painting-his pieces for this magazine were manifestoes which spoke in a much more general way, though they were illustrated by his own painting - I wish I could recall more of the conversation. Unfortunately, I can only report he said that, though he had been painting for some years and with some diligence, the results were meager. At the time, I thought nothing of this: if he was a slow and conscientious painter, and produced such results, well, such was genius. I may have been wrong.

I took away the painting the next day. There had appeared a few small changes overnight. I hung the painting in a favorable location in my living room where I would see it often. I dallied in front of it, I enjoyed it, it was worth living on bologna sandwiches carried to work for two months. This, I was certain, was the beginning of my real career.

About then, my actual career began to occupy more of my time. For a couple of weeks I was sent to Los Alamos; when I returned I had a great deal of work to accomplish at the office. It was six weeks, maybe two months, before I saw Artemus Alford again. Then one day he was on my doorstep with paints and brushes. There were just a few weaknesses in the painting he wanted to touch up, and no, there was no need to take it off the wall. He threw a dropcloth over my couch and went to work, criss-crossing the cushions in his stocking feet. He spent maybe twenty minutes on the work. When he had finished, the painting was a little darker, the position of the woman's body a little more unnatural. I didn't think the touch-ups represented an improvement, but I felt quite uncomfortable with such an opinion. Who was I to criticize? What any longer was my relation to the process of creation? I was no creator; I had renounced all such ambitions. I thanked Alford profusely, praised him for taking so much trouble. I also added it wasn't necessary, and saw him out the door. Two weeks later he was back.

Each time he spent longer and longer; correcting, he said. The fifth or sixth time he brought an easel and spent the entire day I was at the office, and half the night, adding quite substantial touches. The bay window became the battlements of a castle; the garden became fields of wheat, dotted with happy peasants. The woman now looked back, over those battlements. This onset of romanticism was a reversion in two senses: not only did he chronologically revert his style from Impressionist to pre-Raphaelite, but there was also a falling off in the quality. The critics, basing their estimate on the photographic reproductions, have agreed with me; that picture, however, didn't last long.

Then came a time when he started borrowing the picture: it would be gone for a week or two; later, for a month. I began photographing the work as it progressed to have some record, to supplement my poor memory, of its history and changes. Though I tended to be less and less pleased with each version, it was also exciting: this was the very process of creation, this was an artist developing. I was captivated. I had not bought one painting, I had purchased a whole history of painting.

In this way, eight years passed. Once again the painting was gone, and it had stayed away for five months, its longest absence ever; when it came back, Alford had turned Cubist. Even as a Cubist, he painted the portrait of a woman; it must have been the same woman. She had the same shoulder-length brown hair, slender figure, and roman nose. Her head again twisted as if looking back in a direction different from that in which she was traveling. This painting stayed with me a few weeks.

I was without my painting for about two months, (Foolish me. At this time I still thought of it as my painting - it had long since ceased to be so) when I decided to go by Alford's and pick it up. On my way into his new residence - an elevator building off Dyckman - I noticed the building had been condemned and was scheduled to be torn down. Multiple eviction notices were tacked to Alford's door. I knocked and was reluctantly admitted to his tiny studio with a single inadequate window opening on the air shaft. I myself had just moved, northward in the Washington Heights area, one I had secured at a reasonable rent with a small payment to the building's janitor. Though my intention was merely to take home the painting, I took Alford home as well. It was a simple matter to flag a cab and move Alford's few possessions the relatively short distance. What was intended as a temporary arrangement lasted twenty-one years, and was only ended by the recent death of Mr. Artemus Alford.

I was proud of my new apartment; I had furnished it nicely, and it was filled with works of art that reflected my taste as a collector, a taste I was now well into the process of defining. Some might consider that taste retrograde, but in fact there are many modern styles of which I am very fond. What I've come to learn is that my taste bases itself on the value of the human figure.

As I led Alford into my, and his, new residence, I wanted particularly to show off my collection. He could, in fact, be gracious when the moment required it, and he praised my taste knowledgeably and in fairly unreserved terms. But he was uninterested in examining my pictures, and also, rather uninterested in making much use of the comforts I had so carefully arranged. To his credit, if I was the Maecenas, and he the Vergil, his demands did not approach my willingness to be generous. He ate little and rarely drank. He shaved in cold water and without shaving cream; he managed not to cut his chin to ribbons only by using the dull blades I had cast off; these left him with a perpetual five o'clock shadow, though he paid no attention to the television that made such things fashionable. His demands grew less as his stay wore on. Should I have a female visitor for the evening, he discreetly vanished. The occasional weekend when I would have friends in from out of town and wished to use the guest bedroom for its original purpose, he would disappear, unasked. I have no idea where he went, or how he survived. I offered to put him up in a hotel, but he would decline my offer. He seemed to have some other small supply of money; it couldn't have been much, but it was enough so he did not have to ask for any essentials, and was able to maintain his aloofness.

Six years passed and the painting, and I suppose the painter, had turned Abstract Expressionist, somewhat after the fashion of the late Rothko. It was then he wrote the first of his three manifestos: 'The Destruction of Line.' His argument, as readers of this magazine surely remember, was illustrated by his own painting, reproduced in photographs. The culmination of his article, the painting that demonstrated the destruction of line, was titled 'Portrait of Woman,' and it was long argued whether a specific woman was meant or the sex in general, despite the inherent impossibility of a coherent argument, because the painting was entirely non-representational. No final answer can be given, but as my contribution to the argument, I recall to the critical mind all those earlier portraits of a specific woman, many of which still exist in reproductions.

Most of the critical comment was about the thickness of the paint. The obvious presence of so much paint underneath the placid surface of Mr. Alford's painting suggested, it was argued, a subconscious torment present in the painter's mind. Perhaps. The photographer of the painting was widely praised, and this magazine, too, for the expense laid out, in producing a reproduction that did, to some degree, recreate the depths beneath the surface.

I was the uncredited person responsible for those photographs; and, though it is a fact I believe otherwise unknown, all the paintings in that photographic exposition were of one painting, the one painting that hung on my living-room wall at the time of this article, although photographed at different times. I did manage to do something that indicated the depth of the painting, but the actual thickness of paint was by that time so substantial that any barely decent photographic technique would, in fact, produce a great sensation of depth. However, I will say, my excitement in being present at the creative process induced me to a study of photographic technique, and by now I had a substantial collection of medium- and large-format cameras I was using to augment my memory of Alford's painting. How can I explain the excitement caused by the actual presence of an artist who was in the process of acquiring a reputation? I wished to preserve everything. I understood how Frederick the Great must have felt so long as he could keep Voltaire.

Also around this time, I left IBM and established my own consulting firm. Through much painful application on my part to uninteresting manuals, I had become an expert in IBM computer security. I had also acquired a reputation as discreet and trustworthy, essential for one maintaining systems for banks and insurance companies. But I saw the way the wind was blowing, and investigated personal computers early. This interest, and my contacts, enabled my consulting business to weather the technological changes. That, in turn, gave me the financial wherewithal to continue to build my collection, to define and educate my taste as a consumer of art.

Alford continued work on his painting: his posture grew more rounded; his glasses, thicker; his painting, darker. Twice over the next few years he brought home additional framing material and canvas; I believed he was about to embark on new paintings, but all that happened was his single painting became somewhat larger. But even this small sign of ambition sparked a new interest on my part. After the first increase in the size of his painting, he adopted the style of an earlier movement: futurism. There appeared a detailed and realistic painting of a photo-offset printing press, together with long texts in execrable Italian brushed in at the edges, which were new canvas, since he had patched together the whole in such a way the oldest part of it remained in the center of the picture. The text often changed, but it always began with, "Sono una donna." One version from this era was used as the initial example for his next article 'The Destruction of Form.'

Was the development of his painting subservient to his developing theories? Though we would all love to know this, I can't help, he did not much confide in me. Instead I learned, as we all did, how he transformed the seeming nihilism of his title into a new hope for painting. As yet I was brought to only the smallest degree of doubt by what I knew of his work.

Soon after the appearance of this article, Mr. Alford's health began to take a serious turn for the worse. Although I prodded him to see a doctor, and assured him the expense was no concern, he stubbornly refused. He seemed pale and without normal physical vigor, often given to stumbling. I suspected anemia, which shows why I am not a doctor, for he died of congestive heart failure, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of exercise. But before he died, he himself was aware his time was short, and he worked with a new fury at the old canvas. He also wrote what was to become his third and final manifesto, the definitive statement of his meliorist views, 'The History of Painting.' Mr. Alford was sufficiently committed to the production of this article to have me take pictures of his work at specified times, rather than trusting in my general desire for record-keeping, a desire which, in fact, was lessening considerably. This was the essay that finally brought him a more general public. Of course, as we now know, he did not have long to live.

I don't know when it was I ceased to care about this monstrosity that hung on my living room wall. Disillusionment was long in coming. I have already mentioned the excitement I felt in watching the process of creation, strong drink for a patron, especially one who had once contemplated for himself the artistic path. Alford was capable of great painting. But I began to spend more time with the rest of my collection, to enjoy the lighter and more sensual and also, of course, more finished works I had. Who could watch this constantly changing, constantly darkening amalgamation of paint with unending enthusiasm? I tried, but could not. Somewhere I did cease to care.

You have seen what my evidence is, and though I cannot be certain, I believe this is the only painting Artemus Alford ever completed, if he can even be said to have completed this one. The only additional canvas I saw him purchase was added to this same painting. This is the reason I have so carefully used the word painting throughout this recollection; I used it as a singular, and not as a collective, noun.

What then was Mr. Alford's relationship to The History Of Painting? I can only conclude it is a most curious relationship. For painting has a history, but Mr. Alford's work does not. Rather I, with my photographs, have generated his history. In Mr. Alford's world only one painting exists at a time. Who could settle for a world with only one painting? No one, I should think. Normally, no single work replaces all others. No taste would allow this.

It seems to me Mr. Alford did not allow for the integral responsibility of the audience in the work of art. There can be no audience for the vast majority of his work. Alford's strategy forbids even the continued existence of any single work. Because there can be only one Alford painting at a time, this has led me, as the de facto executor of his estate, to my final decision:

I intend to excavate this immense tell of paint - with the help of experts, of course - until I discover the painting I wish to own. Who knows what lies underneath? As Alford's progress was generally chronological, it may not be unreasonable to ask, is there a Rembrandt under it all? Are there the soft colourings of Botticelli hidden in my living room? Let us reveal the human figure, the woman, whose portrait, I believe, this painting always was. Though some may consider such excavation - archaeology is always a process that entails destruction - to be barbaric, I have already begun.

This is my contribution to our collective understanding of the life and work of Artemus Alford, painter.