GLORIA WHELAN
THE FIRST CITY
Even if you live in a city, you are not necessarily there. The city
would gather you in, but you hold back, hold out. During the
Depression I lived together with my parents and aunts and uncles,
too much the only child in everyone's life, in a Detroit apartment
building. The building was owned by my grandfather Liebig, who
had come to this country at the turn of the century from Berlin,
where he had been trained as a painter and decorator. In many of
Detroit's older churches and homes you can still see his workgilded and stippled walls, ceilings with intricate plaster cornices and
cartouches, dining rooms with a frieze of rococo fruits twined with
ivy, winged cherubs modestly garlanded in ribbons. I live, these
days, in a house that is all glass and white walls, hard surfaces and
sharp edges, yet even now when I come upon one of my grandfather's ornate rooms, years of aesthetic discipline fall away and all
my fastidious taste is drowned in a sea of gold leaf and overblown
roses.
Painting was not just my grandfather's profession but his hobby as
well. A humble man, his work was not original but copied from
nineteenth century German academic painting-frenzied horses
being led from a burning barn or sly, jolly monks having a nip from
a wine cask. He would lay a sheet of tracing paper over the picture
he meant to copy and when the tracing was completed, the lines
were punctured with thousands of pinholes. I was allowed to help
with this. The tracing was then laid over a fresh white canvas and
the copy created by rubbing charcoal over the pinholes. Other than
cigar smoke and his signature, my grandfather added nothing to
these pictures but his pleasure in them.
He bestowed upon all of his children more of these paintings than
they could find wall space to hang. After his death, what he had
depended upon for his immortality disappeared, as one by one and
with much guilt, the paintings came down from the walls until all
that remained were a few watercolors from his own drawings of
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