Portraits at an Exhibition: A Novel
by Patrick E. Horrigan
Lethe Press. 232 pages, $18.
IN THE RECENT EXHIBITION at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, one of the more captivating works on display was the artist’s 1890 depiction of the boy Homer Saint-Gaudens, in which John Singer Sargent captured the child’s ennui as he sat wide-legged in a chair, his bored gaze directed toward the viewer rather than his mother, who sits to his right behind him. This riveting portrait is also the first painting to appear in Patrick E. Horrigan’s thought-provoking novel Portraits at an Exhibition. The story takes place in 2005 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an imaginary exhibition about the mind and portraiture from the Renaissance on. Horrigan uses five portraits of men by Sargent, Botticelli, Dürer, Velázquez, and Hans Memling to symbolize the stages of life from childhood to old age.
This debut novel is one of many books in recent years that uses art as the basis for its narrative, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) being among the best-known. Horrigan’s story, like Tartt’s, focuses on a young man whose interaction with art generates reflections about the good and bad he has done, and ultimately this encounter influences his path in life. There the comparison ends, however, for while Tartt’s novel droned on and forgot about the art that started it all, Horrigan’s shorter novel brings up numerous ideas about human experience through an engagement with portraiture, a genre sadly dismissed today by some as old-fashioned. Horrigan achieves this through a set of characters whose lives intersect with the exhibition, as well as through sketches of historical figures who have created, lived with, or written about these portraits over time.
The lives of these secondary characters constitute the most enjoyable part of this novel, with two standing out in particular. The first is art historian Yukio Yashiro, whose interaction with the same Botticelli portrait in 1920s London inspired him to begin drafting in his mind a response to a bad review from noted art critic Roger Fry. Equally engaging is the first-person perspective of photographer Thomas Struth envisioning on a plane ride the creation of a photographic self-portrait standing before Dürer’s self-portrait. Other strong cameo roles that keep the plot moving along are the stories of monk-turned-psychotherapist-living-with-HIV Bernard and black security guard Dora, who can’t stop reading Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Sigmund Freud and Erwin Panofsky even make appearances through references to their writings. Indeed, the character of Dora reinforces the presence of these two important figures, as a woman named Dora impacted the lives and work of both men, for one as a psychoanalytical subject, for the other as an art history writing partner.
The most deeply flawed character in the novel is the protagonist, Robin, who comes off as an insipid gay man who can’t find life’s meaning without doing things that are self-destructive. His inability to combat his addiction to unprotected sex frustrates him, but not as much as it did this reviewer. Robin starts out as a credible character, but becomes less so as more details come to light. For instance, it seems highly unlikely that a graduate of Columbia, albeit a doctoral dropout from Harvard, would end up working as a desk attendant in a New York City art gallery, where one instead typically finds attractive young women (hence the term “gallerina”). Robin has a straight twin who died from drugs and alcohol, but there’s no in-depth exploration into why both brothers became addicts. Recurring descriptions of Robin’s lazy eye and graphic references to “blood coming out of his penis” after sexual escapades are admittedly powerful images, but because of their repetition without resolution they lose strength and become more like Dickensian tics.
Other readers may empathize with Robin and his struggles, as many found The Goldfinch’s Theo someone to pity and adore. Portraits at an Exhibition is an engaging book, unfolding like a visit to an art museum, recounting well the joy both of viewing paintings and of reading wall-text labels, and becoming frustrated by the constant flow of people cutting into one’s space. Horrigan has written an intelligent novel with observations about art and life that are poignant and original. It is just unfortunate that the easel supporting this canvas is a character who doesn’t find solace in art but continues on his own self-destructive path.
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Roberto C. Ferrari, PhD, is the Curator of Art Properties at Columbia University and the author of the novel Pierce (2007).
